What gives power and mastery?

Conscious development is what gives power and mastery.

You cannot blunder into a fine character—you achieve that through effort, willpower, a definite desire. 

Through a defined intelligent desire you attain self-mastery, which includes mastership elsewhere as well. 

When you acquire the brain reasoning faculty to a sufficient degree to link effect with cause, lapse with punishment, you have your feet planted firmly on the upward path. 

To adapt means to ends, manners to morals, you must belong to the upper class where permanent or future gain outweighs present comfort or benefit. 

The child mind and heart only sees what is within his hand's clutch. With him, the desire to possess always outweighs the desire to give or the passion of service—

He must handle what he sees and admires and retain for his own whatever seems good to him—he may share more or less grudgingly with his fellow, but relinquish his treasure? Never, so long as he has power to fight or breath to protest. 

A primitive exhibition of power is it not, this holding on by main force and at all costs to what you fear to lose and find desirable to possess? 

To clutch and cling, struggle and fight, a most undignified method of securing any good is it not? 

When your grasp is loosened, beaten off or what not, you sink in the sea of failure. Why? Think once, quite simply and quietly. 

Benefits are free as air, good is free, service is free, work is free, love, aspiration, ambition, achievement—all are free for all who care to accept the requirements. 

Large aims, sympathetic insight, scrupulous honesty and charity towards your neighbour, cheerful helpfulness, an absence of criticism, thought or expressed, a boundless faith in the power of good, the simple desire to do your utmost to advance the whole, regardless of personal applause and individual advancement. 

Why should you care to exceed your neighbour's possessions except as a means to help him? 

To bring it down to a simple illustration—a man buys a worn-out, dilapidated little farm in a poor, discouraged neighbourhood. 

What is that man's duty, as well as his opportunity? 

He works to make his poor ground yield its utmost—He puts up neat buildings, shelters his tools, is humane to his stock—in fact, he does his best along all lines. His neighbours take courage seeing what he has done, they begin to see hope ahead for them also—they imitate him, better their surroundings, do more work on the land, enter into a brotherly spirit, raise better crops, better stock, better children—a stronger personality has blazed their trail and carried before them a lantern of hope. 

None are so dull as to escape this personal appeal. 

One man inspired by the true spirit can lift any neighbourhood to any height, determined only by the quality of the example and the sympathy of the pathmaker. 

What do you suppose would have happened if Jesus had taught His philosophy unsympathetically or to a single class? 

Fellowship and sympathy speak but one language, and all understand. Individual achievement is nothing—universal service is the insignia of the Master. 

Never belittle service or bewail a lost ambition. 

Ambition to service is the only one, which passes the barrier, and the mode of service should be trusted to those whose business it is to direct your life to the end of larger service, greater personal ability, stronger personality, deeper insight into the law. 

This is what shows whether you have learned or not. 

You have strong primitive feelings, just as a perfectly sane and intelligent person may suddenly feel the grip of jealousy or fear, you revert suddenly without warning to some primitive emotion, which can only be eliminated by a great service with deep sympathy. 

Until you outgrow these unreasoning impulses, you must seek rebirth again and again, until you learn such things are not real and belong only to the childhood of the soul.

The cave man lies just beneath the surface ready to break out whenever some instinct is violated.