Chapter X

The Home Refurnished

within and without. For the home is also the place to picture forth heaven, and often it is the training school where wild, crude mortality learns the joys of peace, order, and loving service, a preparatory school for heaven here on the earth.

Each home that is consecrated to this ministry of the Christ message and healing becomes an example of purity and harmony to those seeking heaven on the earth. Perhaps your ministry cannot yet be an open one, but it can do a silent work by its hospitality, comfort, restfulness, and love. The very walls can sing of goodness and truth. The common furniture can caress us; the homely fare can give us sweetest satisfaction.

Fill your home with blessing. Remove every suggestion of discontent, If there is a room that savors of selfishness or impurity or deadness in its mental atmosphere, heal it, You can do this by spending in it each day a half hour of silence in which you meditate upon the omnipresence of heaven, declaring that some special expression of heaven centers there. The richness of your spirit must enter the place where you reside and permeate it, even though it be a cellar or a hall bedroom. The ease and comfort of a rich consciousness must radiate from your personality. For riches draw riches, and prosperity gravitates to the things and the people that are like it, especially when backed by principle. There are people who look prosperous and who yet are undermining themselves by a false state of mind; and there are people who are rich but do not look prosperous, and they are missing some of the good things that belong to them.

The kingdom of heaven appears when there is perfect harmony and unity between the without and the within.

ACT AND LOOK PROSPEROUS

In proving God to be the health of your circumstances, see to it that your home does not contradict your faith. There is a great law fulfilled in “putting one’s best foot forward.” Businessmen know that it is a good augury of the later success of their projects to have a good office, well furnished.

When an instrument like a harp, violin, or guitar is tuned too low, then one string is raised to the proper pitch and the rest keyed up to it. Sometimes one can raise the whole “tone” of a house and of the household by introducing some rich up-to-date feature and then keying all the rest of the establishment up to that tone, even though many days go by before it is finished.

Act wealthy. Talk prosperously. Be a free avenue through which riches may pass to all. The world needs to learn the spiritual science of wealth, and your home can be a classroom.

FOURTH MEDITATION

BLESS, PRAISE, GIVE THANKS

There is no greater prospering power than the word of blessing, of genuine praise, and of thanks from the heart, directed especially toward those people and those things and events which have seemed to curse us.

As this word must not be merely from the lips, it will require skill, discernment, inspiration, and a prophetic sense to find out what one can praise in one's enemies; to see what one can be thankful for in misfortune or can bless in time of treachery. The very excercise itself will enrich one, as it did the sons of the wise father in the fable.

An Aesopian fable tells of an old farmer who had four lazy sons, and who in dying told them he had nothing to leave them but a field but that in the field was buried a treasure. So when he died they vigorously dug up the field. But they found no treasure. However the next crop that grew in the field yielded four times as much as an ordinary crop; and then the sons know that the treasure in the field was what they put into it--their own energy and faith.

Practice skill and discernment in finding the good in the people who have injured you and in the failures that have burdened you. Let the Spirit inspire your thanksgiving and open your prophetic sense so that you may see the blessing that is coming out of it all. The exercise is enriching both spiritually and materially.

FOURTH TREATMENT

Listen to the divine voice within you.

It guides you. It cheers you. It shows you the way of righteousness and eternal prosperity.

The divine approval overshadows you and protects you.

Your heavenly Father awaits lovingly your return to the spiritual life and its ways, and runs to meet you, saying: Thou art my beloved in whom I am well pleased.

"The blessing of Jehovah, it maketh rich."

The Lord in you blesses your whole world, and the act of blessing enriches you.

You give your heart and mind to blessing everybody and everything.

You bless them that curse you. You do good to them that hate you.

You know no rivals. You have no competition.

All that is done against you helps you.

Your destiny is to know the secret of prosperity.

You cannot fail. Your success is decreed from the foundation of the world.

The Spirit opens your eyes to see the way of success.

There is a straight line between you and the next successful step, and you go forward upon it.

Fear passes utterly away. You are calm and trusting. Your confidence inspires confidence.

You lay up treasures in heaven. You do good and forget it.

You give freely you tenth, our tithe and you reap a hundredfold.

“Bring ye the whole tithe into the store-house, that there may be food [substance) in my house, and prove me now herewith, saith Jehovah of hosts, if I will not open you the windows of heaven, and pour you out a blessing, that there shall not be room enough to receive it.”

No anger can undermine you. No envy can corrode your affairs.

No selfishness can rust you. No greed can overload you.

You are God’s free instrument of distribution.

Riches flow to you and through you to bless all the world.

You freely receive and you freely give. No foolish accumulation burdens you. No loss disturbs you.

You bring faith into the storehouse of plenty. You bring love into the storehouse of opulence.

You bring knowledge into the storehouse of abundance. You bring goodness into the storehouse of all your prosperity.

And they return to you in all the world’s forms of wealth, unlimited, unceasing, full, perfect, and free.

Rest in the divine bounty.