Self Help
I would also have you read, aloud, the foregoing
paragraph, for it embraces a great law that you must understand and apply
before you can become a person of influence in any undertaking. In making
these requests, for the sake of emphasis, I am not trying to take undue
liberties with you.
I am giving you full credit for being an adult, a thinker, an intelligent person, yet I know how likely you are to skip over these vital laws without being sufficiently impressed by them to make them a part of your own workaday philosophy. I know your weakness because I know my own.
It has required the better part of twenty-five years of ups and downs - mostly downs - to impress these basic truths upon my own mind so` that they influenced me. I have tried both them and their opposites; therefore, I can speak, not as one who merely believes in their soundness, but as one who knows. And what do I mean by "these truths"?
So that you cannot possibly misunderstand my meaning, and so that these words of warning cannot possibly convey an abstract meaning, I will state that by "these truths" I mean this: You cannot afford to suggest to another person, by word of mouth or by an act of yours, that which you do not believe.
Surely that is plain enough. And, the reason you cannot afford to do so, is this: If you compromise with your own conscience, it will not be long before you will have no conscience; for your conscience will fail to guide you, just as an alarm clock will fail to awaken you if you do not heed it.
Surely, that is plain enough, also. And how do I happen to be an authority on this vital subject, do you ask? I am an authority because I have experimented with the principle until I know how it works!
"But," you may ask, "how do I know that you are telling the truth?"
The answer is that you will know only by experimenting
for yourself, and by observing others who faithfully apply this principle
and those who do not apply it. If my evidence needs backing, then consult
any man whom you know to be a person who has "tried to get by" without
observing this principle, and if he will not or cannot give you the truth
you can get it, nevertheless, by analyzing the man.