strengthen your self-reliance. You were not meant to stand alone in the world. There is help and encouragement for you to be drawn from others. What you need to strengthen your own individual weakness, you will find in those you meet. All you have to do is to give abundantly of your gift and of your sympathies, and you will always receive the same in return. You will know to whom to turn for strength, to whom for wisdom, and to whom for joy. All the people you meet are sent to you that you may learn from them. You are to learn all you can, so that you, in your turn, can serve those who wish to learn from you. Life is a great co-operative society. We depend upon each other and we should help and sympathise with each other. The aim of life may well be expressed in Kipling's words:

Help me to need no help from men,
That I may help such men as need."

We can only help by being wise. We can only become wise by learning from others. We can only learn by sympathising. Without sympathy we are without all that life holds most dear.

CHAPTER VI

THE TYRANNY OF DOUBT

"Our doubts are traitors,

And make us lose the good we oft might win,

By fearing to attempt."

SHAKESPEARE.

O the timid and hesitating," says Scott, "every

thing is impossible, because it seems so." The converse is expressed in our English proverb,

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Nothing is impossible to a willing mind." Doubt in everyday life is as great a crime as fear in a soldier. If we could only get into the habit of regarding it with the same scorn that the fighting man shows to fear, we should immeasurably increase our achievements in every department of our physical and mental activity. The bravest soldiers are not insensible to fear. They are more afraid to yield to it than to shun death. It is recorded of numberless men that in war-time they seemed to bear charmed lives. Amid a hail of shot and shell they were unharmed. This merely goes to prove that we are prone to exaggerate our dangers. The soldier advances into what he considers certain

death. To his view, nothing can live in the range of fire that he has to traverse. Yet he not only lives, but is unscathed. It must have seemed to the Light Brigade, starting to charge the guns at Balaclava, that it was impossible for any of them to return alive. We know that, though the majority fell, many lived to tell the tale. In all the records of bright and glorious deeds and splendid achievement we read clearly the lesson that the apparently impossible yields submissively to vigorous effort.

The limit of our achievements is the power of our own thought. If you have a healthy ambition, or a burning desire to accomplish great deeds, be sure that your bodily faculties are capable of achieving it. The things you cannot think of, you cannot accomplish. None but a Napoleon could conceive in his mind the gigantic projects that he carried out successfully. Had Napoleon doubted his powers at any moment, that instant he must have failed. Big thoughts are inevitably accompanied by an adequate capacity for realising them in practical effort.

The strength of a chain is the strength of its weakest link. Doubt is the weak link that paralyses many a strong brain. It is appalling at times to stand at the exits of a great railway station in the morning and watch the thousands of people surging out to compete with one another for their daily

bread. One would almost think that it was impossible to strive successfully against so many. Many of them are more talented than you or I. Many who are more talented than their fellows are either on the same low level of living or are even occupying subordinate positions to those who are mentally their inferiors. We all of us know people who, we feel, are less capable than we are, who are, nevertheless, more successful in life. The truth is, that those who rise are those who never doubt their own powers to succeed.

The mind grows on what it feeds upon. If you allow doubt to occupy any place at all in your mind, that doubt will grow there. A little hesitation will grow into a big doubt, and the habit of doubt will surely result in death to self-reliance and good-bye to success. Napoleon said that attack was the safest method of defence. Out with all your doubts and fears! They are unworthy of your mind, which should be in harmony with the Infinite. No task can ever come your way that you have not the power within you to fulfil. Doctors say that the human frame is never called upon to suffer more pain than it can bear. If the pain grows beyond the limit of human endurance, we lapse into unconsciousness. The same is true of the mind. Nothing is asked of us in this world that we are not capable of giving.

As the mind will feed upon doubt, so it will feed

upon hope. When doubt comes into the mind, throw it out. Do not parley with it, do not admit any other consideration than that it has no business there. Say, "I can do this-I will do it," and you will succeed. So long as you admit the slightest possibility of failure, so long there is an influence in your mind that is preventing you putting all your energies into your task.

The mental medicine for doubt is hope. The treatment for lack of self-confidence is perhaps easier than the application of antidotes for any other kind of mental deficiency. Doubt is a negative state of mind. The antidote is hope and determination. Be positive in all your thoughts. When a task lies before you, say, “I will do this," instead of "I will try to do this." Do not ask yourself any questions about your capacity, such as "Can I do this?" Affirm positively to yourself that it lies within your powers to do what you have to do. Negative thoughts are antagonistic to action, and without action there can be nothing accomplished. Positive thoughts, the will to do, are incentives to action, and the brain thrives upon them.

In our self-training we are to accustom ourselves to all those habits of mind which will be beneficial to us in life. The very habit of affirming our power to accomplish will strengthen our mental force. Just as the magnifying glass can be used to