The Rich Mentality, By HARRIET HALE RIX [best mobile ebook reader .TXT] 📗

be happy.
Now we are all after that, are we not? If we could find one word to cover our
aspirations tonight, could we find a larger word, or that is more inclusive than
joy or happiness? I do not mean that happiness which the world so defines
to us a limitation that fritters away and is liable to be lost. I mean the lasting
happiness the happiness that is secured to the individual by fidelity to principle.
Infinite Mind made you for happiness; it made you capable of a supreme bliss,
able to enjoy as you little dream today you can enjoy life. You will begin to smile
the moment you actually believe this and do away with the wrinkled
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thoughts, the troubled thoughts. You will grow perpetually young through the
inspiration of the Almighty penetrating to the innermost realm of your heart, and
you can keep it there and it is bound to make you strong and beautiful. The rich
mentality maintains a cheerful attitude which can smile pain down, and sorrow
away, and seeming trouble into nothingness. It minimizes instantly that which
the world feels to be oppression and loss and in harmony, and feels the mastery
over it. It is a wonderful capital!
A man once came to my door in Alameda and wanted to sell me some
shoestrings. You know the kind of a man who sells shoestrings. He is
a man who does not smile very much. If he smiled very much he would be
selling something else than shoestrings. He does not have the rich
mentality towards life and well being; he does not have the right attitude
towards the law of success. And he came all bent over, although a
young man in years, and begged me to buy a shoestring. He looked so
lugubrious, complaining of every resident of my town, declaring that
nobody was kind and nobody would buy. So he had to get a lesson and this was
the lesson : He was told to go away and instead of look-
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ing so mournful that nobody wanted to open the door, he should go forth with a
smile and with faith in himself and in the kindness of those with whom he
should come in contact. He said: “Will that pay? And will it sell my needles
and shoestrings?” He was assured that it would, far better than the attitude he
had taken. In a few days he came back and told me he had taken my advice and
that he had sold more in that afternoon than in a month, and his business had
picked up and was growing. That is what the smile does. And the world needs
your smile; it is the smile that heals the world. It is the smile, not the groan,
that makes for a spiritual life and for success. Then it should be your part to
contribute these to the world and help others who are bestowing smiles upon the
world to redeem it.
The rich mentality can smile because it knows. It is sure of some things, because
it is absolutely certain of others worth while. It knows God as tenderness and
Love; as the All- Providing Presence and therefore it smiles with an inner smile
of good cheer and certainty and strength.
The rich mentality does not love money, it loves God. How could it love God
supremely
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and love money? It does not divide its forces foolishly, foor it sees readily that
those who love money become metallic, their eyes are metallic, their souls are
metallic, and the strength of muscle and brain lessens daily, being sold in one
who serves money. The rich mentality is master of money, does not serve money,
and, being its master, money feels attracted towards that one.
In here is a certain intelligence in money. It wants to be used by those who are
able intelligently to keep it in circulation, for circulation is the very spirit of
money. If it is hoarded or put away, it corrodes and dies, but as it is kept
in motion, it is kept in life. Therefore it is not the accumulation and the grabbing
of money that constitute wealth, but the giving and letting it go forth freely. To
the rich mentality money is a blessing. But to the poor mentality it is a curse. It is
not that money is the source of evil, but the love of money. Pain and sickness and
sorrow would vanish if we would renounce the love of money, and love God as
our Provider, Success and Life. “The earth is the Lord’s and The fullness
thereof.”
As you decide to stand by the principles of Truth in your success and prosperity,
you no longer work under the false idea of economy,
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because many people are only economical through a belief in poverty, not from
the standpoint of prosperity. Their prosperity is only beggaring them. You have
seen people that deny themselves the luxuries and comforts of life, the things
that make life beautiful, although they have much property and money aplenty
but not the right thought. It is then a matter of thinking, of contacting this great
white Truth. Ignorance or knowledge? Moses is an example. His great riches
were inexhaustible; so magnificent were they that after he had taken the children
of Israel out of slavery in Egypt, he fed them by a self- conscious, working
miracle-law for forty years with a strange bread known as “the manna in the
wilderness.” Did you think that an interfering God had given this blessing to the
Israelites? It was the direct work of the mind of Moses, the God in Moses. He
knew how to produce and reproduce and to keep it up indefinitely. He knew
how to strike a flint rock by which it would spring forth a refreshing stream.
Repeatedly he did this and it was but the forerunner of great things to come, the
symbol of a consciousness-of- providing, that is close at hand, so close” to you
and to me as to be “nearer than our breath” and
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yet we may pass through this incarnation without recognizing or receiving any
benefit from it if we close our eyes to its Presence, or our hearts to its reception. It
needs that we under-stand that God is Prosperity, and every blessing proceeds
from the infinite, inexhaustible Resource, the Mind of God. We want to know
more and more of this wonderful law and how to apply it in life so that it shall
quickly bring to us our own inheritance.
The rich mentality is always original. You are original because God made you so.
I say you are original, but do you insist upon it? Are you even willing to be
original? I question whether you are willing to be as God made you. How
splendid and royal and kingly, if everyone would be willing to be original! To be
original is to be a God-man . It is to be well and to be at home. When you do not
feel at home it is because there is too much pretense. I mean that we are too
willing to go with the crowd, that we would rather be a counterfeit than the
genuine self that God made us. There would be a great transformation if you
would take the stand that God never made two exactly alike. We are all
independent, and yet beautifully interdependent independent in one way, and
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standpoint, interdependent. If we realized this there would never be selfishness
and discord. It would be the Bellamy plan come to fruition. Every man would
find his work, his place, and we would all be doing what we enjoy doing. That
would indeed be the Golden Age. Insist upon originality and resources will
come to you when you are pushed or cornered. You will be the resourceful one
that God made you. God will impress upon you the new way and means to take.
I have a cousin in the West who is an original thinker, who never insists on doing
things as other people do. He has ideas of his own because he dares to think with
God and to let God think through him. He believes that if he should lose all that
he has he could easily regain it through this consciousness. In talking to some
club friends one day he affirmed that, if given a nucleus, even though it
appeared useless, that he would make it produce something without the use of
capital. The friends took him up and he promised to try it out. Looking about for
some nucleus they saw a pile of scrap tin which was about to go into the garbage
wagon. It certainly looked useless and impossible. But the friends said, “There it
is” and
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they left the shop laughing. He felt almost vanquished by his nucleus, but he
looked at it and concentrated his mind upon this tin and he said: “This tin will
tell me what it can do, what is can shape and form and what can come out of
it.” Presently there came into his mind the picture of a little matchbox. And so he
began to cut and bend and pretty soon he had shaped a little matchbox. He
called a boy passing along and asked him to take the matchbox out and try
to sell it for twenty- five cents ; that, if he did, he would give him ten cents of it
for selling it. The boy came back delighted a little while later, having sold the
matchbox for twenty-five cents, and receiving the ten cents promised. So with
this capital of fifteen cents my cousin invested in some paint with which to
decorate the match boxes.
The boy being so happy with his sale, soon brought several other boys, who also
wanted to sell matchboxes, and so in the course of several weeks he had quite a
capital as a result of that scrap tin. And he proved there is a law within us that
we need never remain cast down or crushed if we will not believe that we are
crushed or cornered, but keep our eye on the original way out.
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We have had such false teaching about prosperity from the pulpit. Yet the
Churches and Cathedrals stand as monuments of prosperity, though the
ministers have declared that Christ was poor and that in some strange way his
followers should also be poor. Jesus Christ was not poor. How can you think that
he was poor, or is poor? Why, we are all poor compared to him, as we are
manifesting today. If you know not of what wealth consists, are you not poor as
a Vanderbilt who on his deathbed cried out, “Poor and needy indeed,” because
his wealth consisted of things which he could not take with him, and his mind an
empty void. Jesus Christ was the wealthiest man who ever trod this earth. He
needed not to exercise any effort to maintain himself. He sent his disciples forth,
telling them not to provide two coats, or shoes, or to take scrip with them, for,
he said, “The man I send forth is worthy of his hire,” that is, he will be
maintained by a Divine Law. After a time he said to them, u When I
sent you without purse and scrip, lacked ye anything?” and they said, “Nay,
Lord, we lacked nothing.”
Jesus Christ was not poor. Would you be poor if you could heal every disease
that came to
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you? Would you be poor? Would you be poor if you could raise a dead man
from the tomb? Would you be poor if you could turn