The Prosperity & Wealth Bible. Kahlil Gibran
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the teachings of these lessons without his life becoming larger, nobler and purer, and more enjoyable in the possession of mental and material wealth. And the life that receives and applies these teachings will be like a fertilizing stream in the desert, making it bud and blossom like the rose.
The Reasons for This Prophecy
With absolute confidence I make this prophecy, because I shall give you not theories, spun from the imagination of the poet or novelist or from some dreamy philosopher in the seclusion of his study, or some penny-a-liner who is paid so much per page for his theories, but the actual results of human experience and a study of nature’s laws and especially of the laws of financial gain. I shall give you “the kernel” of the best teachings of a score of our ablest psychologists and new thought writers in concentrated form. And I shall give the personal testimony of those who have risen from poverty to wealth through discovery of the laws of financial success and their application to the life. The principles here laid down have been tested over and over again in the laboratory of life’s experiences and found correct and practicable.
Moreover I myself have proved them and I illustrate these principles and prove their value in my own life.
Another reason why we most confidently predict success to the students of , this course is the fact that the teachings are rational, being in accord with life and human experience, and based on laws that are now known and recognized as governing the accumulation of wealth. These is nothing of mystical charm, no miracle involved, nothing of the “cheap nostrum” order about them. Our method is simply reason amplified and set to work, energy awakened and employed, laws discovered and followed out with the one inevitable result: enlarged and ennobled character, mental and material wealth.
No Special Endowment Required for Money-Making
The way to competence, if not wealth, is open to every man of sound body and mind who will study and apply these laws. The fact that great riches belong to the few, and that some men seem to stumble on riches and others seek them in vain for a life time generally without knowledge of the law or application in the life has led some to suppose that a special endowment of nature is necessary to enable one to attain wealth. Doubtless a few men without a theoretical knowledge of the law have applied it in their lives, and unquestionably some few men seem to come into wealth by “chance” or “luck,” yet there is really no such thing as chance in a universe of law and the vast majority of men who have won wealth have either through their own mentality, or by the teachings of others, or by inspiration, come to know the law and apply it in their own lives.
Every man of sound mind and body, we repeat, can become master of conditions in his life in place of being enslaved, as the multitudes are, by these conditions. There is a pathway from poverty to wealth, from obscurity to fame, from weakness to strength, from the servile and pigmy condition of mind and life, to Kingship in mind and in estate. The door of opportunity is open or, at least, unlocked.
Nature Plans Abundance for All
Another introductory consideration worthy our attention is the fact that the evident plan of God as revealed in nature is abundance for all. Poverty is no part of nature’s plan but the very reverse is true: Nature designed abundance for all. Her provision for man’s wants covers not only his necessities but a super abundance is the law of Nature’s beneficence. The tracing of disease, poverty and suffering to the design of God was, indeed, a part of the Old Theology, which is now practically dead and superseded by the New Theology which traces all of these evils to ignorance and neglect of law.
As children of God we inherit not only the right to life, but to all that makes life worth living. But every life is “cabin’d, cribbed, confined” by poverty. In fact freedom, power, happiness, education, culture, travel, books, art, music, recreation the things that made life worth the living are really impossible without wealth.
Not only is our own life robbed of its full and happy expression by poverty, but man’s service of his fellowmen is limited on every hand by poverty. Men who possess in their own mentality great truths that would instruct and inspire the multitude, or great plans for reforming our deplorable social and economic system, or great purposes of charity toward the needy, or great reforms they would like to see realized find themselves hampered and hindered in all their noble work by “lack of funds.”
The world sad to state estimates a man not by his knowledge, or his character, so much as by the size of his bank account. A public lecturer said recently in my hearing and was applauded in saying it he respected no man who did not have a good bank account.
Harsh as this may appear, we shall show there is at least a small measure of justice in it by pointing out that Poverty is essentially a Mental Disease, and that from the standpoint of character itself in this age of golden opportunities it is no credit to a man to be poor.
Our Desires Are Prophecies and Show the Possibility of Wealth
All students of nature and of man recognize that the possession of a desire within the soul for any real or supposed good, is a natural prophecy proving there is somewhere in Nature’s realm a source of satisfaction for that desire. If my student, then, believes in a Personal God as the designer of all things, can he possibly conclude that God intended to mock us by desires impossible of fulfillment? If so, as Helen Wilmans aptly declares, these desires implanted within us are simply “promissory notes on a ruined bank.” Again, if these desires for wealth are not true prophecies, man is destined as he emerges from barbarism to civilization, to increasing misery and suffering, since desires multiply and intensify as man advances along the upward path of evolution. All studies, therefore, of nature and the human soul tend to convince us that man’s life should have an abundance of temporal good in short that man should rule his conditions and not be ruled by them. We go still farther and unhesitatingly assert it is.
Every Man’s Duty to Make All the Money He Can Honestly
At first sight it might seem that inheritors of great wealth having no need of more money and no love of business or labor might be excused from the task of money making. Not so, however. Every man who enjoys the advantages of our wonderful civilization, who eats the food some toiler has grown, or wears the garments some toiler has made, who enjoys the protection which is freely granted to all, owes a personal debt to the world. Despite his large bank account and broad acres he is but a refined “pauper” if in some way he does not add to the wealth of the world.
And no man has enough wealth to supply, not only his own need, but to fully meet the claims of a world in sickness, suffering and sorrow, and to plan and prosecute the great living reforms of this age.
A man should demand of himself, of society, of his God, abundance of temporal good. The stream of abundance should flow with increasing volume into his life, and the stream of beneficence should flow with equal freedom out of his heart and life, to supply the higher needs of humanity. “Freely receive; freely give.” The ideal life is the one in which a liberal kingly income is assured and man in the royalty and beneficence of his nature should give like a king.
No life can reach its maximum of enjoyment, power and usefulness without wealth.
Is There Great Danger in Acquiring Wealth?
Undoubtedly but greater dangers still in the lack of wealth. The one great danger in acquiring money and in possessing it, is the danger of becoming a slave to gold.
This is one of the vilest forms of slavery and, perhaps, no other form of idolatry is quite so benumbing to all the higher and diviner qualities of manhood as avarice. The miser is of all characters most despised and illustrates the truth of the old proverb “Money is a good servant but a hard master.” No other type of character exhibits such unreasoning folly and seems so fully to merit the rebuke: “Thou Fool.” The one safeguard in the acquisition of wealth is the constant, unremitting cultivation of the human sympathies and the exercise of benevolence. Without this, the acquisition of money is generally attended by a freezing up of the moral nature and a growing love for money for purely selfish purposes, or for money’s sake, ending in avarice and the wretched condition of the miser. It is quite easy to see how the rigid economy many