“Cast you adrift! Never, Sidney dear! Why, you’re still mine, you know! I haven’t given you back to yourself yet, have I? But now let’s talk about your work. If you want to write, you are going to, and you are going to write right.”
“And you, Carmen?” he asked, wondering.
“Back to the Express,” she said lightly. “I haven’t written a word for it now for a month. And how dear, funny old Ned has scolded!”
“You––you dropped everything––your work––all––for a poor, worthless hulk like me,” he sighed. “I––I can’t understand it. You didn’t know me, hardly.”
“Sidney dear,” the girl replied. “It wasn’t for you. It was for God. Everything I do is ‘as unto Him.’ I would have done the same for anybody, whether I knew the person or not. I saw, not you, but the human need––oh, such a need! And the Christ-principle made me a human channel for meeting it, that is all. Drop my work, and my own interests! Why, Sidney, what is anything compared with meeting human needs? Didn’t Jesus drop everything and hurry out to meet the sick and the suffering? Was money-making, or society, or personal desire, or worldly pleasure anything to him when he saw a need? You don’t seem to understand that this is what I am here for––to show what love will do.”
“No,” he murmured. “I––I guess I know only the world’s idea of love.”
“And that is love’s counterfeit, self-love, sentimentalism, sex-mesmerism, and all that,” she added. “But now, back to your work again. You’re going to write, write, write! My, but the world is hungry for real literature! Your yearning to meet that need is a sign of your ability to do it. But, remember, everything that comes to you comes from within. 123 You are, in fact, a miner; and your mine is your mind; and that is unlimited, for God is the only mind, infinite and omnipresent. Now you are going to mine that mind.
“Listen,” she went on hurriedly. “Don’t be afraid to be afraid. We never fear a real thing; we fear only our false thoughts of things. Always those thoughts are absolutely wrong, and we wake up and find that we were fearing only fear-thoughts themselves. Haven’t you ever noticed it? Now destroy the chains of fear which limit your thought, and God will issue!
“Well,” without waiting for his reply, “now you have reached that plane of thought where you don’t really care for what the world has to offer you. You have ceased to want to be rich, or famous. You are not afraid to be obscure and poor. You have learned, at least in part, that the real business of this life lies in seeking good, in manifesting and expressing it in every walk, and in reflecting it constantly to your fellow-men. Having learned that, you are ready to live. Remember, there is no luck, no such thing as chance. The cause of everything that can possibly come to you lies within yourself. It is a function of your thought. The thought that you allow to enter your mentality and become active there, later becomes externalized. Be, oh, so careful, then, about your thought, and the basis upon which it rests! For, in your writing, you have no right to inflict false thought upon your credulous fellow-mortals.”
“But,” he replied, “we are told that in literature we must deal with human realities, and with things as they are. The human mind exists, and has to be dealt with.”