The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

What a revelation would come to the poor people of the world if they would only eliminate from their minds for a single year the poverty thought; if they would erase from their minds poverty pictures and all the suggestions of grinding want that sadden and discourage; if, instead of expecting poverty, and all that the idea implies, they could go through one year expecting just the opposite,—prosperity,—visualizing, talking prosperity, thinking prosperity, acting as though they expected to be, as though they were, prosperous! Just this radical change of thought, this transposition of mental attitude, the persistent holding of the prosperous viewpoint for a year would not only change their whole outlook on life, but would revolutionize their material conditions.

They would brush up and clean up the things they have; their ambition would grow; their new way of looking at life would give an upward tendency to their surroundings. No matter how poor, their squalid aspect would go. Everything would take on a different appearance. There would be a new light in the people's faces. There would be hope there instead of despair,—expectancy of better things would give a glow of cheerfulness to their countenances. There would be a light in their eyes which never was there before. Working in the spirit of hope and expectancy of better things instead of that of discouragement and the fears of even greater poverty, they would forge ahead in a way that would astonish themselves.

The time is not far away when we shall have prosperity practitioners who will make a specialty of teaching people how to free their minds from thoughts that produce poverty by replacing them with their opposites, thus constantly enlarging the mental power of attraction until the mind becomes a powerful magnet, ever attracting prosperity.

These specialists will teach people the creative power of right thinking, and will show them how to attract their desires instead of killing them, as so many do, by wrong thinking. Clergymen of the future will do much toward eliminating poverty from among their people by instructing them to turn their backs on it and to face toward prosperity. They will teach them how to draw to themselves the sunlight of prosperity.

The cure of physical disease is effected by arousing the curative, restorative forces within the individual. These are brought into operation largely through faith in the physician, in the remedy, in the healer. The healthful mental attitude thus created overcomes the disease.

The cure of poverty,—poverty is usually a mental disease,—is effected in a similar way. The sufferer must first of all have faith in the great Physician of the universe. When that is fully and firmly established there will be no difficulty in flooding his mind with the prosperity thought, the thought that our Father-Mother-God is the Author of abundance, the Author of all the wealth of the earth, and that He is infinitely kinder and more solicitous for our welfare than the fondest mother could be for her child.

We have not yet tapped the possibilities of any part of the world's resources. Every inhabitant of the earth to-day is treading on secrets which would emancipate man from drudgery and allow him to live happily instead of merely to eke out a wretched subsistence as he has done up to the present. Hitherto, in the great majority of cases, we have barely been existing on the husks of things. Now we are beginning to taste the kernel, because we are coming into a knowledge of the powers locked up within ourselves, and also of the illimitable supply of God's abundance. Here and there, people are mastering the law of opulence. They are demonstrating that they can conquer poverty by making themselves prosperity magnets; that is, by thinking and working in conformity with the law of opulence, of abundance.

It is monstrous that so many of God's children are starving right on the shores past which the stream of inexhaustible plenty flows, a stream laden with all the rich things of the universe. There is no excuse for the horrible misery and suffering that exist in our midst. There is no reason why the children of the King of kings should be harassed and tortured, driven into premature graves by poverty, for the Creator has produced enough to make every one of His children rich, to give them an abundance of all they need. There is no necessity for those who have inherited all the good things of the earth to remain poor.

The very structure of the human machine indicates that it was intended for the best, that it was planned for comforts, for luxuries, and not for poverty-stricken conditions. If we could only realize the far-reaching influence of always expecting the best to come to us, always expecting opulence, success, we would never allow ourselves to be dominated by the black pictures of poverty and failure. If every one who is suffering from the limitations and humiliations imposed by a grinding poverty would proceed to establish the prosperity habit along the lines suggested; if they would, by continually holding the prosperous thought, convince the sub-conscious self that we were made to be successful, that prosperity belongs to us we should soon sight the millennium.

When we affirm our divinity, and claim our heritage; when we realize that our birthright keeps us in touch with the very Source of all supply, when we know that it was never intended that God's children should be poor or go hungry, that it was never intended they should live in poverty-stricken conditions, then we shall have struck the very basic principle of prosperity.