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Fundamentals of Prosperity

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<h2 class="chapter_title">V Our Real Resources</h2> We have gone daffy over things like steam, electricity, water power, buildings, railroads, and ships and we have forgotten the human soul upon which all of these things depend and from which all of these things originate. Two captains of industry were standing, one day, on the bridge at Niagara looking at the great falls. One man turned to the other and said: “Behold the greatest source of undeveloped power in America.” “No. The greatest source of undeveloped power in America is the soul of man,” the other replied. I was talking with a large manufacturer the other day, and he told me that he was supporting scholarships in four universities to enable young men to study the raw materials which he is using in his plant. I asked him if he was supporting any scholarships to study the human element in his plant, and he said “No.” Yet when asked for definite figures, it appeared that eighty per cent. of every dollar which he spends, goes for labour, and only twenty per cent. goes for materials. He is endowing four scholarships to study the twenty per cent. and is not doing a thing to study the eighty per cent.! Statistics show that the greatest undeveloped resources in America are not our mines or our forests or our streams, but rather the human souls of the men and women who work for us. This is most significant when one resorts to statistics and learns that everything that we have,—every improvement, every railroad, every ship, every building costing in excess of $5,000, every manufacturing concern employing over twenty men, yes, every newspaper and book worth while, has originated and been developed in the minds of less than two per cent. of the people. The solution of our industrial problems and the reduction of the cost of living depend not on fighting over what is already produced, but upon producing more. This means that this two per cent. must be increased to four per cent., and then to six per cent. If all the good things which we now have, come from the enterprise of only two per cent., it is evident that we would all have three times as much if the two per cent were increased to six per cent. Jesus was absolutely right in His contention that if we would seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness all these other things would naturally come to us. This is what Jesus had in mind when He urged people to give and serve, promising that such giving and serving should be returned to them a hundred fold or more. Jesus never preached unselfishness or talked sacrifice as such, but only urged His hearers to look through to the end, see what the final result would be and do what would be best for them in the long run. Jesus urged His followers to consider the spiritual things rather than the material, and the eternal things rather than the temporal; but not in the spirit of sacrifice. The only sacrifice which Jesus asked of His people was the same sacrifice which the farmer makes when he throws his seed into the soil. The story of the loaves and fishes is still taught as a miracle, but the day will come when it will not be considered such. The same is true regarding the incident when Jesus found that His disciples had been fishing all night without results and He suggested that they cast the net on the other side. They followed His advice and the net immediately filled with so many fishes that they could hardly pull it up. If we to-day would give more thought to the spiritual and less to the material, we would have more in health, happiness, and prosperity. The business men to-day would be far better off if—like the fishermen of Galilee—we would take Jesus’ advice and cast our net on “the other side.” We are told that with sufficient faith we could remove mountains. Have mountains ever been removed or tunnelled without faith? The bridging of rivers, the building of railroads, the launching of steamships, and the creation of all industries are dependent on the faith of somebody. Too much credit is given both to capital and labour in the current discussions of to-day. The real credit for most of the things which we have is due to some human soul which supplied the faith that was the mainspring of every enterprise. Furthermore in most instances this human soul owes this germ of faith to some little country church with a white steeple and old-fashioned furnishings. The reason I say “old-fashioned” church is because our fathers were more willing to rely upon the power of faith than many of us to-day. What they lacked in many other ways was more than compensated by their faith in God. They got, through faith, “that something” which men to-day are trying to get through every other means. All the educators, all the psychologists, all the inspirational writers cannot put into a man the vision and the will to do things which are gained by a clear faith. Most of us to-day are frantically trying to invent a machine which will solve our problems, when all the while we have the machine within us, if we will only set it going. That machine is the human soul. The great problem to-day is to develop the human soul, to develop this wonderful machine which each one of us has between his ears. Only as this is developed can we solve our other problems. When we give as much thought to the solution of the human problem as we give to the solution of the steam problem or the electrical problem, we will have no labour problem. We have gone daffy over things like steam, electricity, water-power, buildings, railroads and ships, and we have forgotten the human soul upon which all of these things depend and from which all of these things originate. <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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