After a time they will begin to sprout, after a longer time to cover the barren earth with grain, after a still longer time to yield a harvest.
If you have been accustomed to feeling prejudices and dislikes easily, you will not all at once find it easy to illustrate your assertion, "I am love." If you have indulged yourself in thoughts of disease, the old aches and pains will intrude even while you say "I am health!"
If you have groveled in fear and a belief that you were born to poverty and failure, courage and success and opulence will be of slow growth. Yet they will grow and materialize, as surely as you insist and persist.
Declare they are yours, right in the face of the worst disasters. There is nothing so confuses and flustrates misfortune as to stare it down with hopeful unflinching eyes.
If you waken some morning in the depths of despondency and gloom, do not say to yourself:
"I may as well give up this effort to adopt the New Thought—I have made a failure of it evidently——." Instead sit down quietly, and assert calmly that you are cheerfulness, hope, courage, faith and success.
Realize that your despondency is only temporary; an old habit, which is reasserting itself, but over which you will gradually gain the ascendency. Then go forth into the world and busy yourself in some useful occupation, and before you know it is on the way, hope will creep into your heart, and the gray cloud will lift from your mind. Physical pains will loosen their hold, and conditions of poverty will change to prosperity.
Your mind is your own to educate and direct.
You can do it by the aid of the Spirit, but you must be satisfied to work slowly.
Be patient and persistent.