The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

Our free hospitals, our homes for the aged and poor, our public asylums, are all, like our prisons, working upward toward the light. The fallen, the sick, the poor, the old, the maimed, the bruised and suffering, everywhere are receiving more consideration, more humane treatment, more kindness. And we are finding that greater trust in them, greater sympathy and greater interest in our unfortunate brothers and sisters, are working a marvelous change in human conditions.

In other words, in spite of many seeming contradictions, many glaring evils in our midst, many setbacks and discouragements, the spirit of the Christ, of the Golden Rule, is acting like a healing leaven and performing miracles in the great human mass.

Love is the great mind opener, the great heart opener and life-enricher, the great developer. It is what holds society together, and if children were trained to love humanity, to love all countries and their inhabitants as they are taught to love their own country and countrymen, there would be no wars. War proceeds largely from what is called patriotism. And patriotism in its narrower sense, which seeks only its own good, its own aggrandizement, at the expense of other countries and peoples, has ever been the curse of the race. When our love is big enough to say, "The world is my country," wars will cease.

A few days ago I was attracted by an advertisement in a morning paper which said, "When every other physician has given you up; when you have failed to find relief from all other sources, then come to me. You are the sort of person I cure." The advertiser may have been a quack, but the advertisement would make its appeal, perhaps, to the desperate, the discouraged, who had been given up as incurable by the regular profession, and it set me to thinking. "Why, this," I said to myself, "is the language of Divine Love's advertisement. 'Come unto me all ye that labor and are heavy laden and I will give you rest.' When you have failed to find comfort, satisfaction or joy in anything else, when your friends have deserted you, when your business is ruined, when you have made fatal mistakes and society has closed its doors on you, when everybody else rejects and denounces you, when everything else has failed, then come to me and you shall find peace and rest."

Love is the sovereign remedy. It is the last resort of those driven to desperation. When nothing else is left, when life is full of bitterness and anguish, the thief, the murderer, the failure, the outcast turns to Love and finds a refuge, for "Love never faileth."

Love is to every human being what mother love is to the erring child. No son or daughter has ever fallen so low as to get beyond a mother's love. When society has turned its back on the outcast, when the prison door closes behind him, when companions have fled, when sympathy and mercy have departed, when the world has forgotten, the mother remembers and loves her child. She visits her boy in the "death house," her daughter in the dens of vice in the slums. The child can never stray too far for the mother's love to follow. It is the most perfect prototype of our Father-Mother-God's love.

The Vedanta scriptures, which are thousands of years older than the Old Testament of our Bible, commanded us to love our neighbors as ourselves because we are all neighbors, because of the oneness of all life, because the same spirit is in all human beings. Until we see and live in conscious coöperation with this oneness of spirit, until the world sees it in all human beings, there will be public strife, private quarrels, greed, selfish ambition, inhumanity of man to man, poverty, crime, all sorts of wretchedness and misery. Love alone can wipe all these out. Human laws, repression, punishment will never do it. Christ's way, Love's way, holds the solution of all life's problems.

I was talking recently with a cold-blooded, overbearing, brow-beating business man who told me he was going out of business because he was so tired and sick of incompetent, dishonest help. His employees, he said, were always taking advantage of him, stealing, spoiling merchandise, blundering, shirking, clipping their hours. They took no interest in his welfare, their only concern being in what they found in their pay envelope. "I have enough to live on," he concluded, "and I don't propose to run a business for their benefit. I have tried every means I know of to get good work out of ignorant, selfish help, but it is no use, and now I have done with it. My nervous system is worn out and I must give up the game."

"You say you have tried everything you could think of in managing your employees, but has it ever occurred to you to try Love's way?" I asked.

"Love's way!" he said disgustedly. "What do you mean by that? Why, if I didn't use a club all the time my help would ride right over me and ruin me. For years I have had to employ detectives and spies to protect my interests. What do these people know about love? Why I would have the red flag out here in no time if I should attempt any such fool business as that."