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Why is it that most of the great men of the world, most of the unusually successful men, started life under a handicap?

Demosthenes, the greatest orator the ancient world produced, stuttered! The first time he tried to make a public speech, he was laughed off the rostrum. Julius Caesar was an epileptic. Napoleon was of humble parentage, and so poor that it was with the greatest difficulty that he got his appointment to the Military Academy. Far from being a born genius, he stood forty-sixth in his class at the Military Academy. And there were only sixty-five in the class. His shortness of stature and extreme poverty discouraged him to such an extent that in his early letters to friends, he frequently referred to thoughts of suicide.

Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson and a number of our Presidents started life in the poorest and humblest of homes, with little education and no advantages. Stewart, who started what is now the John Wanamaker Store in New York, came to New York with $1.50 in his pocket, and no place where he could hope to get more until he himself earned it. Thomas Edison was a newsboy on trains. Andrew Carnegie started work at $4 a month. John D. Rockefeller at about $6 a week.

Reza Khan, who became Shah of Persia, started as an ordinary trooper in the Persian army. Mustapha Kemal, late Ruler of Turkey, was an unknown officer in the Turkish army. Ebert, first President of Germany after World War I, was a saddle maker. A number of our own Presidents were born in log cabins, without money, without education.

Sandow, the strongest man of his time, started life as a weakling. Annette Kellerman was lame and sickly, yet she became diving champion and one of the world’s most perfectly formed women. George Jowett was lame and a weakling until he was eleven years old. An older boy bullied him and beat him until he aroused such a feeling of resentment in young Jowett that he determined to work and exercise until he could pay back that bully in kind. In two years, he was able to beat the bully. In ten years, he was the world’s strongest man!

Why is it that men with such handicaps can outstrip all of those naturally favored by Nature? Why is it that the well-educated, well-trained men, with wealthy and influential friends to help them, are so often pushed aside, to make way for some “nobody” whose family no one ever heard of, but whose sheer ability and force make him a power to be reckoned with?

Why? Because men with early advantages are taught to look to material things for success ... to riches or friends or influence or their own training or abilities. And when these fail them, they are at a loss where to turn next.

But when a man has no special skill or ability or riches or influence, he has to look to something outside these for success, something beyond material means. So he turns to the God in him, to his cell of the God-Mind, and of that cell he demands that it bring him fame or fortune or power or position. What is more, if he continues to demand it with persistent faith, HE GETS IT!

You see, in every adversity there lies the seed of an equivalent advantage. In every defeat there is a lesson showing you how to win the victory next time. The turning point in the lives of most successful men has come at some moment of crisis, when everything looked dark, when there seemed no way out. That was when they turned to their inner selves, when they gave up hope in material means and looked to the God in them for help. That was when they were able to turn each stumbling block into a stepping-stone to success.

“Isn’t it strange that princes and kings,

And clowns that caper in sawdust rings,

And common folks like you and me,

Are builders for eternity?

“Each is given a bag of tools,

A shapeless mass, a book of rules;

And each must make, ere life is flown,

A stumbling block or a stepping stone.”

You are one with the great “I AM” of the universe. You are part of God. Until you realize that—and the power it gives you—you will never know God. “We are parts of one stupendous whole, whose body Nature is, and God the soul.” God has incarnated Himself in man. He seeks expression. Give Him work to do through you, give Him a chance to express Himself in some useful way, and there is nothing beyond your powers to do or to attain.

It matters not what your age, what your present circumstances or position. If you will seek your help outside your merely physical self, if you will put the God in you into some worthwhile endeavor, and then BELIEVE in Him, you can overcome any poverty, any handicap, any untoward circumstance. Relying upon your personal abilities or riches or friends is being like the heathen of old, whom the Prophet of the Lord taunted. “You have a God whom you must carry,” he derided them. “We have a God who carries us!”

The God of personal ability or material riches or friends is one that you must continually carry. Drop him, and immediately you lose everything. But there is a God in you who will carry you—and in the doing of it, provide you with every good thing this world can supply. The purpose of this book is to acquaint you with this God in you, The God That Only The Fortunate Few Know.

As the poet so well expressed it—

“In your own self lies Destiny. Let this

Vast truth cast out all fear, and prejudice,

All hesitation. Know that you are great,

Great with Divinity. So dominate

Environment and enter into bliss.

Love largely and hate nothing. Hold no aim

That does not chord with Universal Good.

Hear what the voices of the Silence say—

All joys are yours if you put forth your claim.

Once let the spiritual laws be understood,

Material things must answer and obey.”

Some might think that merely a poet’s dream, but along comes Dr. J. B. Rhine of Duke University to prove it scientific fact as well.

In his new book “The Reach of the Mind,” Dr. Rhine points out that in the past, Science seemed to feel that man was entirely material. It had discovered how glands regulate personality through their chemical secretions; it had shown that the child mind matures only as the brain develops; that certain mental functions are linked with specific areas of the brain, and that if one of these is injured, the corresponding mental function is lost.

So Science believed that it had accounted for all the processes of thought and action, that it could show a material basis for each.

But now Dr. Rhine and other experimenters have proved that knowledge can be acquired without the use of the senses!

Not only that, but they have also proved that the powers of the mind are not bound by space or limited by time I Perhaps their greatest discovery is that the mind can influence matter without physical means.

This has been done through prayer, of course, since time began, but such results have always been looked upon as supernatural. Dr. Rhine and other experimenters show that any normal person has the power to influence objects and events.

To quote “The Reach of the Mind”—“As a result of thousands of experimental trials, we found it to be a fact that the mind has a force that can act on matter. ... There must, therefore, be an energy convertible to physical action, a mental energy.”

The one great essential to the successful use of this mental energy seems to be intense interest or desire. The more keyed up a person is, the more eager for results, the more he can influence those results.

Dr. Rhine showed through many experiments that when the subject’s interest is distracted, when he lacks ability to concentrate his attention, his mental energy has little or no power over outside objects. It is only as he gives his entire attention to the object in mind, as he concentrates his every energy upon it, that he gets successful results.

Dr. Rhine’s experiments prove scientifically what we have always believed—that there is a Power over and above the merely physical power of the mind or body, that through intense concentration or desire we can link up with that Power, and that once we do, nothing is impossible to us.

It means, in short, that man is not at the mercy of blind chance or Fate, that he can control his own destiny. Science is at last proving what Religion has taught from the beginning—that God gave man dominion and that he has only to understand and use this dominion to become the Master of his Fate, the Captain of his Soul.

“Body and mind and Spirit, all combine

To make the creature, human and Divine.

Of this great Trinity, no part deny.

Affirm, affirm, the great eternal I.

Affirm the body, beautiful and whole,

The earth-expression of immortal soul.

Affirm the mind, the messenger of the hour,

To speed between thee and the Source of Power.

Affirm the Spirit, the eternal I—

Of this great Trinity, no part deny.”

Ella Wheeler Wilcox