What you find is Bootstrap-lifting; you find gentlemen and lady practitioners shutting their eyes and lifting their hands and pronouncing Incantations in awe-inspiring voices—­or in Capital Letters and large type:  “God is infinite, God is All-Loving, #god will provide.# Bread is coming to you! #Bread is coming to you!!  Bread is coming to you!!!”

You think this is exaggeration?  If so, it is because you have never entered the building of the pretty ladies, and sat in the gray wicker chairs of the metaphysical library.  One of the highest high-priestesses of the cults of New Nonsense is a lady named Elizabeth Towne, editor of “The Nautilus”; and Priestess Elizabeth tells you: 

     I believe the idea that money wants you will help you to the
     right mental condition.  Be a pot of honey and let it come.

I look over this Priestess’ magazine, and find it full of testimonials and advertisements for the conjuring of prosperity.  “Are you in the success sphere?” asks one exhorter; the next tells you “How to enter the silence.  How to manifest what you desire.  The secret of advancement.”  Another tells:  “How a Failure at Sixty Won Sudden Success; From Poverty to $40,000 a year—­a Lesson for Old and Young Alike.”  The lesson, it appears, is to pay $3.00 for a book called “Power of Will.”  And here is another book: 

Master Key:  Which can unlock the Secret Chamber of Success, can throw wide the doors which seem to bar men from the Treasure House of Nature, and bids those enter and partake who are Wise enough to Understand and broad enough to Weigh the Evidence, firm enough to Follow their Own Judgment and Strong enough to Make the Sacrifice Exacted.

#"Dollars Want Me"#

I turn to the shelves of pamphlets.  Here is a pretty one called “All Sufficiency in All Things,” published by the “Unity School of Christianity”, in Kansas City; it explains that God is God, not merely of the Soul, but also of the Kansas City stockyards.

This divine Substance is ever abiding within us, and stands ready to manifest itself in whatever form you and I need or wish, just as it did in Elisha’s time.  It is the same yesterday, today and forever.  Abundant Supply by the manifestation of the Father within us, from within outward, is as much a legitimate outcome of the Christ life or spiritual understanding as is bodily healing....  “Know that I am God—­all of God, Good, all of Good.  I am Life.  I am Health.  I am Supply.  I am the Substance.”

And here is W.W.  Atkinson of Chicago, author of a work called “Mind Power”.  Would you like to be an Impressive Personality?  Mr. Atkinson will tell you exactly how to do it; he will give you the secret of the Magnetic Handclasp, of the Intense, Straight-in-the-eye Look; he will tell you what to say, he will write out for you Incantations which you may pronounce to yourself, to convince yourself that you have #Power#, that the indwelling presence with all its #might# is yours.  Mr. Atkinson rebukes mildly the tendency of some of his fellow Bootstrap-lifters to employ these arts for money-making; but you notice that his magazine, “Advanced Thought”, does not decline the advertisements of such too-practical practitioners.