This applies not only to the individual life but also to the life of the whole world, for the world itself is merely a great mass of individual lives joining their hopes and fears and aspirations in one common accord.

It is written that the nation without a vision shall perish from the face of the earth, and we know that an individual without a vision perishes daily. But if we can come to believe that most of our troubles are self-imposed, that they were never really intended to be, and if we can have complete conviction that there is a Presence and a Power, which is always on the side of right, then we shall have the courage to start all over again. No single individual or nation ever existed that finally won out against the power of good.

We are individuals, and we shall have to start with the self. Beauty and peace and joy really are in the eye of the beholder, and life belongs to the one who lives it, and gladness sings in the heart of one who is glad. We shall have to start with ourselves and somehow or other find our way back to the innocence and the peace and the joy of those days which knew no trouble, those times which had no fear, because we felt the protecting presence of our human parentage. We must feel the guidance of love and wisdom and the security and joy that come only from a sense of belonging to the Universe and from a feeling of trust and faith in a Power greater than we are.

We had this when we were children, and then as we began the slow and tedious and sometimes heartbreaking process of growing up, we all but lost that early vision when the world was our world, when everything was for us, and nothing was against us. Whether we accept the simple proposition of Jesus, which is by far the best of all, or the slower processes of modern psychology which painfully and laboriously take us back in our imagination to a place of security within, through what they call self-awareness, we shall arrive at the same conclusion.

Personally, I think the proposition of Jesus should be accepted