Earth has no claim the soul cannot contest;
        Know thyself part of the Eternal Source;
        Naught can stand before thy spirit’s force: 
    The soul’s Divine Inheritance is best.

* * * * *

Thought is at the bottom of all progress or retrogression, of all success or failure, of all that is desirable or undesirable in human life.  The type of thought we entertain both creates and draws conditions that crystallize about it, conditions exactly the same in nature as is the thought that gives them form.  Thoughts are forces, and each creates of its kind, whether we realize it or not.  The great law of the drawing power of the mind, which says that like creates like, and that like attracts like, is continually working in every human life, for it is one of the great immutable laws of the universe.  For one to take time to see clearly the things one would attain to, and then to hold that ideal steadily and continually before his mind, never allowing faith—­his positive thought-forces—­to give way to or to be neutralized by doubts and fears, and then to set about doing each day what his hands find to do, never complaining, but spending the time that he would otherwise spend in complaint in focusing his thought-forces upon the ideal that his mind has built, will sooner or later bring about the full materialization of that for which he sets out.

* * * * *

    Beauty seen is never lost,
      God’s colors all are fast;
    The glory of this sunset heaven
      Into my soul has passed,—­
    A sense of gladness unconfined
      To mortal, date or clime;
    As the soul liveth, it shall live
      Beyond the years of time. 
    Beside the mystic asphodels
      Shall bloom the home-born flowers,
    And new horizons flush and glow
      With sunset hues of ours.

    Whittier

* * * * *

Would you remain always young, and would you carry all the joyousness and buoyancy of youth into your maturer years?  Then have care concerning but one thing,—­how you live in your thought world.  It was the inspired one, Gautama, the Buddha, who said,—­“The mind is everything; what you think you become.”  And the same thing had Ruskin in mind when he said,—­“Make yourselves nests of pleasant thoughts.  None of us as yet know, for none of us have been taught in early youth, what fairy palaces we may build of beautiful thought—­proof against all adversity.”  And would you have in your body all the elasticity, all the strength, all the beauty of your younger years?  Then live these in your mind, making no room for unclean thought, and you will externalize them in your body.  In the degree that you keep young in thought will you remain young in body.  And you will find that your body will in turn aid your mind, for body helps mind the same as mind helps body.