Your Forces and How to Use Them (Complete Six Volume Edition). Prentice Mulford
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is noble and refined up to our full capacity of realizing nobility and refinement, we are-actually sending our thought, a literal part of ourselves, into the higher and more refined and more powerful current of thought. The feminine spirit has more power to so send its thought than has the masculine; and although man may express in words or other ways grand and beautiful ideas, it is because those ideas have in the rough, so to speak, been brought him through a woman seen or unseen. She might not have been able to put them out in the form he did, or express or act them in his peculiar method. But she gives the idea just as I may give you the diamond, and you may cut and polish it, which the woman might not so well be able to do. But she finds the diamonds, and for her true companion it is ever her delight to find the diamonds of thought, of idea, of device; and it is in the completed union as great a pleasure for him to put the idea so given by her into practical operation. If woman is made to work as it may suit man’s present convenience to have her work, she will find him clay instead of diamonds.
If woman, when she finds out her true value and relationship to man, will not assert that value and insist on its recognition, not in the style of the scold or vixen, but that of the dignified, loving queen, anxious to please; but firm in insisting on her method of pleasing and serving, then she is as much at fault and fully as responsible for all the pains that she suffers as he is. Because no one can get justice for us but ourselves; and it is our business, when we see clearly that we have a value for others, to make known our value to them. If those to whom we make it known cannot see it, then we should cease giving until they can see it; and if we continue to give when we see our gifts misappropriated and wasted, then we are the greatest sinners. If you throw silver dollars to a crowd in the street, they will scramble for all you throw, and barely thank you for them. There is often just as unwise and profitless giving of sympathy and all the aid that comes of sympathy in the closest relations of life. When any gift ceases to be fully appreciated, and is still looked for as a matter of course, he or she who so continues to give sins more than he or she who receives; for if they know the value of what is given, and the other party does not, it is the business of the wisest party to take some method for making that value known. Sympathy is force. If you think a great deal of another, and yours is the superior mind, you are sending them force, sending them a current of thought-element, which may feed, inspire, and strengthen them in both mind and body. If you do not receive back a thought-current of similar quality, you are injured in mind and body. You give, as it were, gold, and get back iron. The inferior mind you so feed and strengthen may be able to absorb but a part of your gold—your quality of thought. The rest is wasted. That inferior mind may in cases be that of the true husband, whose spirit as yet has not grown to fully appreciate the value to him of his partner’s thought. A man and woman begin to realize the result and profit of a true marriage when both are united in the purpose of making themselves more healthy in mind, and as an inevitable result more healthy in body, and when both have one great aim or purpose in life.
They will recognize that if the thought of one is in any way low, grovelling, or vulgar, such thought must prove an injury, and the greatest of injury, to the other, and if persisted in will ultimately prove an injury to both. Both will be ambitious and aspiring to make of themselves ever-growing powers for good to all. When the man recognizes in the feminine companion mind a source to him of new idea,—a river flowing to him from the currents of clearer thought; when she in the man recognizes in turn the power that shall take and apply this thought to practical uses on that stratum of life with which her finer organization is less fitted to cope—then theirs is a true marriage. Then as regulating their united lives on this basis, and demanding, desiring, or praying often for divine guidance, or, in other words, for ever-increasing store of clearer and wiser thought, will they give each other new life to the body and new life and power to the mind. They will re-clothe their spirits with new bodies. They will ultimately live as they may desire, either in the seen or physical world, or in that unseen world of spirit in which they may belong. They are then on the road to powers hitherto unknown or but vaguely hinted at in this our present stage of immaturity and crude and imperfect civilization. They will be each to the other as healers, as teachers, and always as lovers; and the stage of the next year’s love, the next month’s love, the next week’s love, and to-morrow’s love, will be one more exalted, more blissful, more intense, than the love of to-day. Because their union is of that order suggested by a teacher of old; it is as “a savor of life unto life,” and not of “death unto death,” as any outward union must be which is not sanctified by both love and aspiration to be better, purer, and more powerful to-morrow than to-day. And it is only a united aspiration for more of goodness, more of power, more of Divinity, that will bring what is now so often and so vainly sought for, the love which ever glows, the love which never tires, the love which is to-day as tender and considerate in so-called trivial things as it was when wooing was the order of the day, and the too common indifference of winning had not set in.
The reason that the priests of more than one faith are enjoined to celibacy is not because marriage in its highest sense is for them really wrong. It is because that the real wife of the true priest, the man of a finer type than those about him on the earth-stratum of life, does not live on this, the seen side of existence, but in the other; and from that other is still constantly bringing him new ideas, new plans, new truth, new inspiration; and should that man come into much association with another person, and allow his sympathies and life to become much absorbed in that person, he would thereby surround himself with that person’s coarser and inferior thought-element; and this, besides giving him lower and coarser thought, would form a barrier and cut him off completely from his companion-priestess, his wife, and the two halves of the complete whole (or the whole in time to be completed) would be temporarily separated. Such separation can only be temporary. When the first Napoleon left Josephine (who was his true wife) and married Maria Louisa, his fortune deserted him, because he absorbed from the Austrian princess an inferior order of thought. It blinded him. It warped his judgment. It cut him off from his true source of inspiration or force. Josephine warned him against undertaking the fatal campaign against Russia; for, such confidence had Napoleon in Josephine’s judgment and intuition, that he sought it many times after their separation. But the atmosphere of the lower order of thought, through daily association, was too near him to see with his true wife’s eyes as before, because the influence or mind of the person you are in the closest association with will be the ruling influence to greater or less extent, despite all your efforts to prevent it. If it be as a lower order of thought, it is pitch; and you cannot escape having that pitch cling to you.
It is not possible for any other man or woman to put asunder permanently those whom God, or the Infinite Force of Good, has joined together. They are as much destined for each other, as the planet is destined for the sun about which it revolves.
It is in the possibilities of existence, that the two of a complete marriage may be the one in the physical, the other in the spiritual or physically unseen life. It is also among other possibilities to be recognized in the future, that through the continual closeness and blending of the thought or spirit of the two, there would grow eventually a tangible union, even on this side of life, and that, in any case, they would be united on the other side; a union which would be retarded if the other road was followed. For, if the man so situated unite himself with another woman, he might find on losing his body, that though his life with her was not happy, yet her influence or thought, whether she was in the body or out of it, still hung about him, drawing him away from his real partner, or forming betwixt him and her a barrier she could not pass or penetrate, and often as a result of this another re-incarnation will be inevitable before his spirit attains to such strength, or sees with the spiritual eye with sufficient clearness to know the woman destined for him.
But I mean here by priest and priestess, every man or woman inspired in the field of poetry, or letters, or statesmanship, or stateswomanship, or art, or invention, or any thing which in the domain of mind shines with lasting brilliancy and gives all lasting good. All men and all women who can do any thing better than it is now done, and thereby give to life a more lasting brightness and happiness, be they healer, teacher, actor, artist, mechanic, inventor, are priests in their vocation.
IV.
THE GOD IN YOURSELF.
Thoughts are Things.