The Victorious Attitude

by Orison Swett Marden

He lives best and most who gives God his greatest opportunity in him. If we only knew how to live and move and have our being in Him, to be conscious of this every instant, we should then know what true living means. We should be satisfied, for we should then awake in His likeness.

"Deep within every heart that has not dulled the sense of its inner vision is the belief that we are one with some great unknown, unseen power; and that we are somehow inseparably connected with the Infinite Consciousness."

It is a mental law that thoughts and convictions can only attract their kind. A hatred thought is a hatred magnet and the longer we harbor it, the more steadily we contemplate it, focus our minds upon it, the larger and more powerful the hatred magnet becomes.

In the early days of the great European war a Jewish soldier, in the first line of a Russian battalion, engaged in a man to man fight with an Austrian in the opposing battalion. In their desperate encounter the Russian Jew drove his bayonet through the breast of his opponent. As the latter, an Austrian Jew, fell mortally wounded, with his dying breath he gasped the Hebrew prayer, which begins, "Hear, O Israel." The Russian, realizing that he had killed a brother Jew, overcome with horror, fell fainting on the battlefield. When he regained consciousness he was a raving lunatic.

When will men realize that we are all brothers; that we are all members of the same great human family, children of the same great Father-Mother-God. When will we see that though oceans and continents divide us, though we may speak different tongues, may differ in race, color and creed, yet we are so closely related in thought and motive that our deepest, most vital interests are identical.

Time and again despite all outward differences has that invisible bond of union which binds mankind into one great family manifested itself even on the battlefield. There men who have sabered or shot at and wounded each other have become fast friends and learned to feel their brotherhood. Many and many a time has it happened that soldiers who had been bitter enemies in battle and had tried in every way to kill each other, have found while convalescing side by side that they were really one in sympathy and feeling, brothers at heart and did not know it. If these men had known and seen into one another's soul before the battle as they had afterwards in the hospital they never could have been induced to fire at or to try to injure one another.

In spite of our failures, our blunders, our crimes, the nations are coming closer and closer together. Scientific discoveries, marvelous inventions, the extended use of steam and electricity, the conquest of the air, all these are fast welding the interests of mankind and bringing into close and intimate relation the most distant countries of the globe. The Occident and the Orient are no longer at the ends of the earth. They are beginning to know and to respect each other, and to learn each from the other. They are beginning to realize in its largest sense the truth of Kipling's utterance:

"But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face, tho' they come from the ends of the earth."

Scientists are piling up proof after proof of the unity, not only of mankind, but of everything in the universe, of the oneness of all life. They are demonstrating that there is but one substance, one eternal force or essence in the universe, and that all we see is but a varying expression of it. Everything about us is merely a modification, a change of form of this universal substance, just as electricity is a manifestation of force in various forms—in its unchained power in rending giant trees and destroying huge buildings, and as harnessed by man in moving trains, in lighting our homes, in furnishing heat for cooking and in many other domestic and industrial devices.

The lesson of lessons for us to learn from this is our inseparable union with the Creator of life, that everlasting, eternal unity of spirit, that oneness with the Father which Christ came to teach.