who have greatly influenced the human race throughout the ages are those who have known this and who have made but little effort to influence others. They are the ones who have had the deepest feeling of the Divine Presence within them.

But someone might say, “I don’t wish to make a mark on history. I don’t feel myself capable of becoming a great leader or a dominant factor in social or political or commercial life. All I want is just to be happy and get along with people and have them like me.” And such a one would be right. For the development of real personality must be something that attracts to itself everything necessary for its well-being, which is love and friendship, right human relationships, success, and happiness.

But those who make personal ambition their main approach to life always seem to fail. Again we are privileged to go back to one of the fundamental thoughts of Jesus who also knew what our human needs are and never belittled them. He said that all these things will be added if we discover the real secret of life and first uncover within ourselves something that we did not even put there, something that we might call the hidden self.

No one will ever be satisfied, happy, or secure in just developing a dominant personality. For those who try to win their way through life by force some day become weary with the struggle – a mad ambition the end and aim of which never reaches its final goal. Personality is not an external thing at all, for everything we think and say and do, and everything that we appear to be outwardly, is always a result of some hidden fire burning at the center of our being, some Divine Reality which we did not create but which we may discover. I think we can say without hesitation that the person who finds himself in God will discover at the center of his own being something which dominates without effort, something which does not have to assume a false front, something which, by the very nature of its being, is both human and Divine.

But someone may say, “But now you are introducing religious ideas that we don’t want to be bothered with. What we want is