With here and there an exception we reverse the process.  We live in the valleys, so to speak, often disease-infected valleys, when we might mount up to the mountain-tops, and there dwell continually in the warm and mellow sunlight of God’s, or if you please, of nature’s great, unchangeable laws, and find ourselves rising ever higher and higher, and revelations coming new every day.

The Master never claimed for himself anything that he did not claim for all mankind; but, quite to the contrary, he said and continually repeated, Not only shall ye do these things, but greater than these shall ye do; for I have pointed out to you the way,—­meaning, though strange as it evidently seems to many, exactly what he said.

Of the vital power of thought and the interior forces in moulding conditions, and more, of the supremacy of thought over all conditions, the world has scarcely the faintest grasp, not to say even idea, as yet.  The fact that thoughts are forces, and that through them we have creative power, is one of the most vital facts of the universe, the most vital fact of man’s being.  And through this instrumentality we have in our grasp and as our rightful heritage, the power of making life and all its manifold conditions exactly what we will.

Through our thought-forces we have creative power, not in a figurative sense, but in reality.  Everything in the material universe about us had its origin first in spirit, in thought, and from this it took its form.  The very world in which we live, with all its manifold wonders and sublime manifestations, is the result of the energies of the divine intelligence or mind,—­God, or whatever term it comes convenient for each one to use.  And God said, Let there be, and there was,—­the material world, at least the material manifestation of it, literally spoken into existence, the spoken word, however, but the outward manifestation of the interior forces of the Supreme Intelligence.

Every castle the world has ever seen was first an ideal in the architect’s mind.  Every statue was first an ideal in the sculptor’s mind.  Every piece of mechanism the world has ever known was first formed in the mind of the inventor.  Here it was given birth to.  These same mind-forces then dictated to and sent the energy into the hand that drew the model, and then again dictated to and sent the energy into the hands whereby the first instrument was clothed in the material form of metal or of wood.  The lower negative always gives way to the higher when made positive.  Mind is positive:  matter is negative.

Each individual life is a part of, and hence is one with, the Infinite Life; and the highest intelligence and power belongs to each in just the degree that he recognizes his oneness and lays claim to and uses it.  The power of the word is not merely an idle phrase or form of expression.  It is a real mental, spiritual, scientific fact, and can become vital and powerful in your hands and in mine in just the degree that we understand the omnipotence of the thought forces and raise all to the higher planes.