[Sidenote:  Saving a Thousand a Year]

A young man married.  He was proprietor of a flourishing “general” store in Princeton, Indiana.  He and his bride forthwith resolved that they could and would lay aside out of their income a thousand dollars a year for ten years, by which time they would have ten thousand dollars and accumulated interest and could go into business in a big city.  At the end of the first year, when they took stock of their savings, they decided that thereafter, instead of trying to save a thousand dollars a year for ten years, they would undertake to save ten dollars a year for a thousand years and would be more apt to succeed.  Today they are just where they began.

You all know such men—­men who are always starting and never finishing.

[Sidenote:  Looking for a “Soft Snap"]

Ninety-five per cent of the men who go into business are “quitters.”  The very first disappointment sends them scurrying to cover.  They begin to look for a “soft snap” away from the firing line.  Is it any wonder that so few reach any great success?

That there is an enormous lack of appropriation of energy in most men’s lives is an undoubted fact.  Just where this energy is stored, and just what its eternal significance may be, is immaterial to our purpose.

It may be that this reserve is Nature’s safeguard against our extravagance.

It may be, as some philosophers contend, that the subconscious, with its vast stores of energy, is a higher, more spiritual phase of man.

[Sidenote:  Drawing Power from on High]

It may be that the subconscious is for each one of us his individual segment of the Divine Essence—­that it marks our “at-one-ment” with God.

It may be that to evoke these latent energies is to call upon those resources of our being which are the embodiment within us of the spirit of the Creator of all things.

It may be that this Divine Essence, if adequately aroused, may exert an absolute transcendence over material things and lift humanity to a God-like plane.

“What we call man,” wrote Emerson, “the eating, drinking, planting, counting man, does not, as we know him, represent himself, but misrepresents himself.  Him we do not respect; but the real soul whose organ he is, would he let it appear through his action, would make our knees bend.”  “I said, ye are gods,” quoth the Psalmist.  “Be ye perfect, even as your Father,” was the injunction of the Master.

Whatever the eternal significance of your latent energy may be, the fact remains that it is yours, and yours to use.

If you are to succeed, if you are to do big things, you must be a man of “doggedness.”  You must keep your eyes trained everlastingly upon the vision of the thing you want.  You must stay in the race until you get your “second wind.”  You must be master of yourself and draw freely on your stored-up powers.