Prentice Mulford - The Collected Works of Prentice Mulford

If you think corruption, you will breed corruption in your body. You will have sores or boils or eruptions, or some disease coming of “bad blood,” which is the real cause of all disease. The blood is made impure by the spirit’s impurity. The spirit is the life of the blood. The spirit is your thought. What you think, comes of your spirit. What you think, you are ever building into your spirit. Impure or corrupt thought means far more than licentious thought. It means as well the ugly, hating thought, or dislike of others. It means the thought of gain, at any cost to others. It means all fretting, discouraged, despondent, and hopeless thought. It means long-continued grief at any loss. It means any thought that weighs down the spirit. What weighs on the spirit, will always injure the body. To grieve at the loss of a friend, will “pull one down,” as well as what are called specially “immoral practices.” The injury done the body may be quite as great. Therefore the sin is as great. People who fret are great sinners. They are-creating a fretting spirit. They are solidifying their fretting into a habit which becomes more and more difficult to break off. This tears the body to pieces, and will eventually kill it. These people, then, are as guilty as the victim of some loathsome disease caused by vice, so-called. Any habit which injures is a vice. True, some diseases are more respectable than others. Consumption sounds better than delirium tremens. Yet both kill the body. Both come of violations of the law. Both are penalties paid for such violation.

Every thought of yours has a literal value to you in every possible way. The strength of your body, the strength of your mind, your success in business, and the pleasure your company brings others, depends on the nature of your thoughts. Every one of your thoughts is a part of yourself. It is felt by others as a part of yourself. You need not always speak, to be agreeable company. Those near you will feel your thought pleasantly, if yours are pleasant thoughts. You need not always speak, to be felt disagreeably. Your disagreeable thought will also be felt. A person’s “magnetism” is their thought. Magnetic power or influence is simply thought felt by others. If your thought is despondent, gloomy, jealous, carping, cynical, it repels. If cheerful, hopeful, and full of earnest desire to do the most good possible to any one you meet, though but for a single minute, it attracts.

Too much association with any one of lower thought may lessen your natural power to attract. You may carry a part of their selfish, cynical, gloomy, or other evil thought with you wherever you go. You put it out with your own. It is felt as a disagreeable alloy with your own.

Your value and charm for others, as a companion, depends far more on what you think, than on what you say. If your thought is all pure, clean, bright, confident, and courageous, you are a value, and an increasing value, wherever you go. People will always be glad to see you. When you bring yourself (your thought), you bring an actual pleasure to people. You bring also a power and strength to them. Your thought helps to strengthen their bodies. They feel better for seeing you. You are as a fountain of health and pleasure wherever you go. You can disarm the sourest temper, and the person most opposed to you. When you can say in mind, “I refuse to look upon any person as my enemy,” you will have no enemies. When we talk of “having enemies,” and keep on, in thought, looking on certain people as enemies, we are making them enemies, because such people feel that order of thought coming from us. It is an element flowing from you to them. It affects them disagreeably. If you are ever sending out the thought, “I am not your enemy. I do not wish to feel disagreeably towards you. I want to like you better than I do,” they will soon feel this thought. They cannot resist its power. The thought of good is always stronger than that of evil. This is a law of nature.

The corner-stone in the power and charm of a person’s thought is this, expressed in words, “I want to help you in whatever way I can. I want to help build you up. I want to help you to better health, to better business, to the place where you really belong, to the position where your talents may most shine.” If this thought is sincere, it carries immense power. It will always be drawing more power to you, because every additional person’s good-will you so draw and fasten to you is an additional unseen rill of life feeding yours. It is a rill of substance, though unseen,—as real as the elements we do see. Good-will of others is constructive thought. It helps build us up. It is good for your body. It makes your blood purer, your muscles stronger, and your whole form more symmetrical in shape. It is the real “elixir of life.” The more of such thought you attract to you, the more life will you have. You draw, then, the best elements from all with whom you associate. If you send out a contrary order of thought, you draw to you from them the poisonous and destructive elements. These will hurt your body. Persons in this way are literally hated to death. The ill-will of many people fixed on one man can injure that man’s health. It has killed many. It can injure no one, if they oppose it with the thought of good-will, and the desire to do justice, which must always go with good-will. Nothing else can successfully oppose it. If you persist in the thought of good intent to all, you are connecting yourself with the higher and more powerful order of thought-element. You are then receiving of that thought from minds, and from a world of greater power than you can now realize of here. You are connecting yourself with a world which does nothing but build up, whose inhabitants are gods in power, and whose creations at will are beyond our wildest dreams. All that so-called fable or fancy has conceived of are realities in the higher worlds of mind. When, by the thought of good intent to all, you so connect yourself with that world, you are receiving of their powerful thought. You are then absolutely safe against all enemies.

This is no myth of sentiment. It belongs to the same system of law whereby the sun gives heat, the winds blow, the tides move, the seed grows. In whatever mood you set your mind, does your spirit receive of unseen substance in correspondence with that mood. It is as much a chemical law as a spiritual law. Chemistry is not confined to the elements we see. The elements we do not see with the physical eye outnumber ten thousand times those we do see. The Christ injunction, “Do good to those who hate you,” is based on a scientific fact and a natural law. So to do good, is to bring to yourself all the elements in nature of power and good. To do evil, is to bring the contrary destructive elements. When our eyes are opened, self-preservation will make us stop all evil thought. Those who live by hate will die by hate; that is, “those who live by the sword will die by the sword.” Every evil thought is as a sword drawn on the person to whom it is directed. If a sword is drawn in return, so much the worse for both.

Christ controlled the elements by the power of his own thought, and his connection with the higher and powerful world of thought. Thought being substance, can, when very powerful, be so concentrated as to be made visible in physical forms. It was Christ’s thought, and the power so exercised, that caused the so-called miracle of the loaves and fishes, and all the others.

Once, on a woman’s touching the hem of Christ’s garment to be healed, he said, “Who hath touched me? Virtue hath gone out of me.” This was a woman full of evil thought. Christ felt immediately the contamination of her thought. It was to him as poison. Mingling with his own, it for the moment corrupted it. It lessened for the moment his power to control the elements. By virtue going from him, he meant power going from him.