The Unconscious Influence Of Our Thoughts

Again I want you to consider this...how much of our unconscious influence lies in our thoughts.

Not only by what we do and what we say, but by the kind of thoughts we are cherishing in secret, do we impress ourselves upon our neighbors and help or hinder the little world we move in.

That very suggestive and spiritual writer, Mr. Maeterlinck, puts the matter in his own poetic way.

He says, "Though you assume the face of a saint, a hero or a martyr, the eye of the passing child will not greet you with the same unapproachable smile, if there lurk within you an evil thought."

Now probably there is a little exaggeration there; one thought, flashing and then expelled, may not reveal itself.

The totality of saintly character is too great to be overborne by the intrusion of one shadow of the devil.

But it is certain that by the thoughts we harbor and let ourselves dwell upon and cherish in the dark, we touch and turn and influence our world when we never dream that we are doing it.

There is nothing hidden that shall not be revealed - what a depth there is in that one word of Jesus!

He is not merely thinking of God's judgment bar tomorrow.

He is thinking of the undetected revelation of today.

Christ recognized that the kind of thing we brood on, the kind of thought we allow ourselves to think, though it never utter itself in actual words, or clothe itself in the flesh and blood of deeds, encompasses and affects the life of others like a poisonous vapor or like a breath of spring.

Your secret is not such a secret as you think. 

Why are men drawn to you? Why are men repelled by you? 

Why is it that sometimes we instinctively shrink from people in the very first hour that we meet them?

It is because the heart...more powerful than any x-ray deciphers for itself the secret story, brushes past speech and deed into the hidden place and apprehends the existence that is there.

To think base thoughts is a sin against our neighbor as surely as it is a sin against ourselves.

To be unclean even in imagination is to make it harder for others to be good.

In the interests of our influence then, no less than of our happiness, you see the need of governing our thoughts.

~George H. Morrison~