Self Help

use they could not forget the crowd outside the footlights; fear brings self-consciousness, and this is death to all true greatness. Singers fail again and again because self-conscious fear stifles their breath and grips them so that they cannot express their best. One season I had the opportunity of watching the workings of fear in the human mind. We gave weekly an afternoon New Thought matinee, and the first hour was devoted to reading, impersonations, and music, the other hour was given to the regular lecture. I heard many of the readers and singers at rehearsal with no one present but ourselves. The singers sang like angels and did their parts in splendid power and abandon, but afterward, when the hour came for public work they failed to get themselves across the footlights or to be one-tenth of one percent expressed! Why? They had a large, friendly, inspiring audience people anxious and ready to be generous and accord them full recognition, but they failed to make a place for themselves in the heart of the public, because they were paralyzed with fear, they were afraid of their own kind; afraid of the civilized men and women who came out just to be entertained and who only asked of them that they should do their best. Fear! self-consciousness and lack of poise took away their immortal birthright and gave them a mess of pottage. There is no cure for fear but faith. One has to first know the truth that all life is the same life and everyone on the path of life is seeking the same things and going in the same direction. There is only one man on the path and he is ourself, yesterday, today or tomorrow. "No man is our friend or enemy, but all are our teachers." The old mystics said, "Have faith in yourself before God." And, "Blessed is the man who condemneth not himself that thing which he alloweth." There is no way of reducing life to a certainty. The years are always more or less full of things, people and conditions which are new. It is necessary for true progress, and to be afraid to meet each new day is soul cowardice, from which we must rescue ourselves. Life demands that we induce at a moment's notice an intelligence which will cope with any and all things around us and do it masterfully. The one who has faith in themselves will never doubt other things, they will build their resolve on their ideal and fling themselves resolutely after it. Over half of life is lived in consciousness, and idealization, and it takes a faith as boundless as ou