This is the last part of this book. Before gonna this part, I would like to thank all. Because this book was published in 1965. I bought this book in 2017 from an old book shop. I was really fascinated by the contents of the book. It conveys everything how the human should live with discipline. But I could able to write in a very short manner about this book. Precisely, if I am sharing the lines of the book, it should make an impact on the readers. Of course, I think a few elaborations from every content is needed quite often. This book really changed me. I hope it will change you all. It’s my pleasure. I had shared to you, avid readers. I love you all.

The author starts with,

Memo to the readers no: 9

THE FIVE WIZARDS WORDS:

A few years back I wrote a book about positive thinking that surprised me by quite a success. It seemed to help people, and I received many letters of praise which-naturally-pleased me very much. I also get some pretty sharp criticism from the people who prided themselves on their intellectualism and sophistication. Positive thinking, these critics said loftily, was too down-to-earth, too simplified, too much of cliché, to do anyone any good. It was lifting yourself by your mental bootstraps. It was wishful thinking. It was this, it was that.

Well, when you are the target of criticism, it’s a good idea to listen to what the critics say and try to evaluate it honestly.

“A man,” said Emerson, “is what he thinks about all day long.” This is one way of expressing deep spiritual law, the law that says: “Good thoughts drives out bad.”

Five wizard word: get your mind off yourself. Try it sometimes you’ll see.

THE QUEST FOR SELF-MASTERY:

And so, we come, finally, to the last chapter. It seems-and is-along time since my solitary walk in the summer, moonlight when the idea of writing a book on the moral challenges of our time first occurred to me. But writing it has been an exciting challenge in itself.

What can I add now to what I had already said?

I have stated and restated my theme: the need to strong inner controls to replace the crumbling outer ones, the need for inner directedness. In an increasingly directionless world, the desperate need in all of us for the kind of responsibility to self and society and the human race that alone can lift man to his full stature in this difficult and demanding world.

I think it all comes down to three things:

1. an attitude.
2. a decision.
3. an action.

There is a verse in the Bible that hammers home that importance of this. In the Gospel according to St. John, Jesus says, “If ye know these things, happy are ye if ye do them.” The implication is crystal clear: it’s not enough just to have wisdom in your head. You must put it into action in your life. Mere knowledge of the importance of inner control isn’t sufficient; you must demonstrate it.

Do something specific and concrete that will demonstrate your determination to change yourself and your life for the better. Pay a debt. Heal a broken relationship. End a quarrel. Offer an apology. Pray for someone out loud. Visit someone who is sick, or shut in. Restrain yourself from buying something you had planned to buy for yourself and give the money to the charity instead.

Do whatever you do quietly, without ostentation. And do it, not from fear of punishment or hope of reward, but simply because you want to do it because you prefer to be an inner-directed person.

Don’t content yourself with passive acceptance; break the inertia of the past with the positive, dynamic action, and you will find that you have released hidden powers that will make subsequent acts seem easy by comparison.

Only man can accumulate knowledge and wisdom, and pass them on.

 

With respect.

 

 

POLITICS AND MORALITY.

Is our nation growing stronger or is it growing weaker?

Are the checks and balances built into the constitution still working?

Are our citizens as free now as they were fifty or a hundred years ago?

Are the forces that made this country great as strong as ever?

Is our star still rising or has it begun to wane?

It seems to me that the fundamental question to politics today is that:

How much government is a good government?

Assuming a reasonable amount of honesty, goodwill, and good sense on the part of our elected or appointed as officials, do we want the role of government in our lives to grow greater or less?

Today, with the five or six per cent of the people in the world, it produces over half the total wealth of the planet and has shared the wealth with friends, former enemies, and dubious neutrals in the most extraordinary display of generosity in the history of mankind. I mention this generosity because, while amassing wealth and producing wealth may not be among noblest among of nation, willingness to share those products of ingenuity and effort certainly is.

A man was judged not so much by what had has and what he was. Wealth was the useful things to have, and fine if you could get it, but integrity was more important Duty, honour, loyalty-these not just high sounding words, but the quantities that some men sought and found, all men responded with admiration and respect.

As Abraham Lincoln once said, “You cannot build character and courage by taking away man’s initiative and independence. You cannot help man permanently by doing for them what they could and should do for themselves.

We must not only willing to make our own decisions and govern our own affairs, but we must also insist on the right to do so, and fight for the right with ideas, with education, with persuasion, with an exhortation, with the ballot, with any legitimate weapon we can lay on our hands on.

Only thus can we reach full self-realization as responsible human beings. And only thus will our country, as we know and love it, continue to endure.

Memo to the reader no:9

Dialogue in the dark:

“Any decent person can feel anger and revulsion when some fellow citizen is brutalized, or treated unfairly in the courts, or denied the right to vote. But to realize within yourself there is a little coiled snake of contempt for your neighbour because he’s a Negro, or a protestant, or a Catholic or a Jew-or maybe because he is not any of these things that the real challenge. And to meet it takes real self-honesty, real self-discipline, real self-control.

With respect.

 

 

                           

 THE CHALLENGE OF OUR PHYSICAL SELVES:

The author starts with, “you sleep and eat better and think better.” 
Well, your body like the horse and your mind are like the trainer and your will is the jockey.
How is your mind going to be clear and alert if the body that houses it only half alive?
How is your body going to be superb machine it’s designed to be unless your mind and will control it?
“MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO,” I murmured, using one of the few Latin tags I know.
“A healthy mind is a healthy body,” he said.

The Greeks and Romans were more aware of the connection then we are. They knew there had to be a body-minded balance if a person hoped to be self-fulfilment.

DISCIPLINE IS THE PRICE YOU PAY FOR THE FREEDOM.

Because, it’s is profoundly true, and it is the heart of what I’m trying to say in this book.
Discipline is the liberator: it sets you free-free from the tyranny of laziness, of sloth of flabbiness physical and mental, of harmful habits.

Discipline restores the freedom of your choice: you no longer have to have a cocktail in lunch, you no longer feel compelled to go out in the middle of the night in order to obtain the pack of the cigarettes. When you are a disciplined person, authority is no longer forced upon you from without; it’s something that you yourself control from within.
Difficulties seem to diminish, problems grow smaller, your reserves of energy come flooding back-and all because you’re giving your work-hungry body and diet it needs, at last!

To a great extent, the disciplined person controls his life and his environment. He doesn’t have to be afraid of it. 

One of the most successful control devices is to see yourself as you want to be. Imagination is stronger even than willpower because it can sink into the unconscious mind and bring changes that willpower unaided cannot always achieve.
If you think of yourself as a defeated person, you tend to activate negatives forces that work toward producing defect. If you conceive of yourself as a victorious person, you stimulate creative forces that push you on to victory.

In the last analysis, both the spirit and the body have to be toughened by the discipline and self-denial. If the full potential of the human is to be realized. If the body is too weak, the spirit cannot drive it beyond a certain point. And if the will is lacking, the strongest muscles in the world will not respond to the challenge. But with the will is strong and the body is strong there is almost nothing that a person can do.

America was built by strong-willed, strong-muscled men; our history is full of their exploits.
Memo to the reader no:7
OUTER PRESSURES AND THE INNER BRACES:
1. You can study yourself and get to know the areas of weakness.
2. You can try to strengthen these weak places by self-discipline and self-denial and prayer. 
3. You can build your moral resistance with spiritual exercises just the way you can build your body with physical exercises. Then when the moral pressure of life come, gradually or suddenly you’ll not be able to endure them. 

As Rousseau said two centuries ago: “Those who would treat politics and morality apart will never understand the one or the other.” 
He was right.

Up next, the most required chapter is waiting for us.
Politics and Morality.

With respect.

 

 

 

 

THE AUTHOR STARTS WITH THE CHAPTER AS FAMILY.
THE FAMILY: BEDROCK OR QUICKSAND:

If the family is strong, then the nation is strong. If the family is weak, then the nation is weak. And what’s the status of the family America today?

The word that comes to my mind is ’shaky.’

Not all the families, to be sure. But in general, the symptoms of the moral revolutions through which we are living can be seen plainly enough in family life. There is a breakdown of authority. There is a breakdown of discipline. There is a breakdown of communications. There is a breakdown of responsibility.

Now if the foundations on which a structure rests have become shaky, you must do one of two things: either tear the structure down or fix the foundations.

A combination of love and discipline is our basic formula.

Since I had always believed that affirmations are stronger and more useful than negatives,

Let’s save the positive exhortations for lasts and begin with don’ts. 

There are five of them. Here they are:

1. Don’t give your children too many things.
2. Don’t saddle them your own fear, prejudices or frustrations.
3. Don’t be overprotective.
4. Where discipline is concerned, don’t vacillate. 
5. Don’t stifle their talent for religion.

So much for the deadly don’ts. Now here are the not-so-deadly Do:

1. The first, and simplest, is this: show affection.
2. Trust them.
3. Encourage them to think for themselves.
4. Cultivate the ability to communicate with them.
5. Show them what self-discipline is.

What I have been trying to say in this chapter: that there must be inner controls if civilization is to endure that these inner controls must be taught by disciplined parents in the home, only thus can a nation produce people strong enough to face the challenges of the destructive forces of the universe.

“Train up a child,” says the Bible, “in the way, he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.” 
What a responsibility-and what an opportunity.

MEMO TO THE READER NUMBER: 6

THE SPRINGBOARD OF OPTIMISM:

“Well,” you might say to me at this point,” you’ve been talking for me more than half a book now about the need for self-discipline, self-control, do you acquire those things? 
How do you even begin?
You start the way all the journey starts, with a single step.
Only in this case, it’s not a physical step, it’s a mental one. 
You have to decide that you can do it. 

A great psychiatrist once said, “The basic factor in physics is a force, the basic factor in human affairs is the realizable wish. 

Two things Edison has said. “Science has barely scratched the surface of the possibilities of the universe,” he said. And added. “There’s no limit to what you can do with non-human nature.” 

No-limit-that’s optimistic phrase.

There is one area where I think most could do a lot right now to improve and strengthen ourselves, and that’s the realm of physical fitness, the way we use-or abuse-our own bodies. All too often the marvellous envelope that our own house our souls or spirits gets less care then give-say-the family car. But self-discipline can pay marvellous dividends, too.

In the next chapter, I’ll tell you how this realization was brought home to me and why I think it’s important to you.

With respect.

 

 

 

THE AUTHOR STARTS WITH THE CHAPTER:

MARRIAGE: CONTROL OR CHAOS.

The purpose of this book-admittedly an optimistic purpose-is to enable the people to see the necessity for such inner directions and to help them to acquire it.

“One sign of maturity”. I told them, “in recognition of the fact that all people have flaws, including you. Another is the ability to learn from past mistakes. So go on home and start learning. You’ll be happy if you do, miserable if you don’t. It’s simple as that!”

There is no easy prescription. There is only one rule that applies in virtually in every case. Control yourself. That’s the secret: control, control, control. 

“The real goal in marriage,” I told them, “is not to eliminate all quarrels; it’s to have civilized one rather brutal, hurtful ones that leave permanent scars. And there are specific, definite things to keep in mind. 

For instance, try to keep a different level of opinion at the discussion-not the argument-level. Keep your voice down. If the heat begins to build up, speak in a whisper. It’s very difficult to carry on a violent argument in a whisper! Look down at your hands.
1. Are you gripping the arm of the chair?
Relax!
2. Are your fingers clenched?
Uncurl them!

Before you hurl your next verbal bombshell, take ten deep breaths-this is better than simply counting to ten.

Incidentally, beware of that word ‘always.’ If you start telling your married partner that he or she ‘always’ does this, does that, it’s a sign that you are losing your own emotional control.

Deep understanding underlines the gentle and Christ-like quality that we call compassion. “Tout comprendre” says that old French proverb. “c”est tout pardonner-to understand everything is to forgive everything. 

Timing is the key to success in almost everything, from athletics to salesmanship, and marriage is no exception. 
Good timing isn’t accidental or instinctive; it’s a blend of imagination and awareness of other people needs, and self-control. And like all self-discipline, it pays a great dividend to who master it.

Each of them has to agree to contribute half an hour a day period of a week, agree to follow directions, and agree to complete the experiment even though they may resist some part of it as first.

Again, the author got the memo to the reader, number 5. 
                                            STOP STARING AT STEREOTYPES:
Try it yourself, and you may surprise sometimes at how your attitude changes. Now let’s take look at the area of life where there should be no stereotypes, where interpersonal attitudes are all-important: the family itself.

With respect.

 

 

THE AUTHOR STARTS WITH CHAPTER AS,

SIN, SEX AND SELF-CONTROL.

“To preach the morality is easy,” wrote Schopenhauer; “to find the foundation for morality is hard.”

The ultimate foundation for morality is that immortality doesn’t work, it doesn’t pay off. It doesn’t lighten the burden of living It increases it.

“Every day.” “is an opportunity not to repeat a mistake; every day is an opportunity to do better. That’s a form of forgiveness, isn’t it?”

Furthermore, it’s not enough just to make see the need for self-control and then piously urge them to have it. You have to offer them specific techniques for acquiring such values controls. Otherwise, all your arguments and persuasions will be wasted.

“Society is you, it’s your relationship to every person to meet, every single day. You can’t get out of it any more than you can get out of your skin. Everything you do affects society. Even your thoughts affect it.

“Love always includes responsibility, remember that, if what you’re feeling doesn’t include it, then it isn’t loving. You can’t have one without the other!”

Marriage does not licence for sex-selfishness. This is something that even happily married couples would do well to stop and think about occasionally.

Sex is too powerful, too profound, too elemental a force to be treated lightly or casually. It’s like NITROGLYCERIN-useful so long as it is protected and safeguarded, deadly is it is mishandled or abused.

One basic purpose of sex relations obviously is to create a new life, bring children into the world.

Another basic purpose of sex is, giving oneself to another person.

Be honest with yourself:

1. Are you using another person to gratify your own desire-or worse, to conceal your own inadequacies from yourself?
2. If you’re a married man, must you have a sense of conquest to sustain a shaky ego?
3. If you’re a married woman, you are trying to compensate for the emotional poverty of your marriage?
4. Are you sex a refuge from anxiety, worry, cowardice, lack of achievement?
5. It is cover up for the deep sense of personal inadequacy?

Self-honesty in answering such questions is always difficult, and usually painful, but sometimes it can be the beginning of real maturity.

Again, the author making a Memo number: 4

Try Being yourself:

“Why don’t you try being yourself for a chance, instead of what you think other people expect to be?”

“This is the way I am, and from now on this is the way I’m going to be.”

With respect.

 

 

STARTING WITH MEMO NUMBER:3

THE DUBIOUS POWER OF DON’T:

The trouble with this approach is that the power of “Don’t” is really limited to many areas. Take the matter of cigarette smoking, for example. In the past few years, overwhelming evidence has been presented pointing to the conclusion that cigarette smoking is major health menace, conducive that not only to lung cancer but to a host of other physical ills. Smoking cigarette is plainly unwise and dangerous, and a chorus of voices had arisen-all saying “Don’t”; doctors say “Don’t”; insurance companies say “Don’t”; countless magazines articles says “Don’t”;

And what happens?

People go right on smoking; because the purely negative argument will not stop them. The only thing that will never stop them is an inner conviction, made by themselves, for positive reasons leads to positive actions.

They will not listen if you say, “Don’t smoke; it’s bad for you.” they might listen if someone said,

“Why not control your life, why not be the master of your habits, why not know the excitement and pride and joy of your responsibility and self-command.

THE WHIRLWINDS OF SEX:

Sex is the topic of universal interest, but around it swirl such powerful emotions and prejudices that a sane and balanced discussion of it is rare, to say the least. At one extreme there are people who feel that if you discuss the sex revolution at all you are condoning it-and I must say, some of our self-appointed “Sexperts” seem to be doing just that.

1. adopt a helpless and pious oh-isn’t-it awful attitude that will bore and exasperate them.
2. utter a serious of thunderous prohibitions based in the ancient authorities that no longer make sense to them, or
3. pontificate at length on a subject about which, being a minister, he is not likely to know very much.

We say to out adult citizens, never mind the rules, just control yourself and behave decently-only to find that the whirlwinds of sex are too powerful in many cases to yield to self-control.

Before, sitting down to write these chapters, I did some extensive research. I read literally dozens of books, pamphlets and magazines article, sociological studies, and statistical reports, and church pronouncements on both sides of the Atlantic.

“Sexual freedom should be permitted to the fullest extent short of injury-provable injury-to another human being”.

I have had told me that sex is too explosive and dangerous a commodity to be handed over to immature people with no strings attached. It’s is too much like letting a small child decide himself whether or not to run across a traffic-filled intersection. He just doesn’t have judgement. You can explain the hazards to him, you can point out the dangers, but then you have to say “Don’t!” and make it stick.

This belief of mine does not contradict with the theme of this book, which is a need to self-responsibility.

It’s is simply recognize that the process of growth is required before self-responsibility becomes possible and that until that growth is achieved, people must be protected-even against themselves.

Otherwise, they may damage or even destroy themselves before they get within shouting distance of true self-control.

 

With respect.

Starts with Memo Number: 2

I must say, I’ve always felt indebted to the man who invented the literary device known as a chapter. I don’t know who he was, but he had a great idea. A new chapter gives a writer a wonderful feeling of excitement and buoyancy and optimism.

Now it’s time to discuss the specific things that each can do to make ourselves more honest than we are. And this really deserves a new chapter, because it requires some thought and effort and self-honesty.

Some chapters you can read quickly; other you can read slowly; still, other you should read twice.

Maybe this next chapter is one you should read twice.

BLOW THE DUST OF YOU STANDARDS:

The answer is that is simple: you begin with yourself.

And are six things to do, starting today.

1. TAKE A MORAL INVENTORY:

You might be asking yourself, with grim honesty, whether your moral standards are higher or lower than they were five years ago.

Do you condone things-on the grounds of liberalism or sophistication-that you would have condemned in your more idealistic days?

Have you become so accustomed to little distortions of that truth, to minor acts of dishonesty, that you are hardly aware of them anymore?

Sometimes it helps to review with ruthlessness your moral performance in the chief areas of the living-your job, your marriage, your social life, your relationship with your children.

2. FIND AND USE MORAL YARDSTICK:

“Behind a great deal of our modern immortality,” writes my distinguished colleague Harry Emerson Fosdick, “is not so much downright badness as sincere confusion as to what is right.”

The great German thinker, Immanuel Kant, offered as a guide to moral his Categorical Imperative: always act as if your action becomes a universal principle to be used by all men. Yet what is this but the Golden rule in fancy clothing?

3. USE THOUGHT-CONTROL:

All actions good or bad, start with the thought. If you can block the thought that leads to a dishonest deed, you will block the deed itself. Because you break the chain of cause-effect that leads to the deed.

The moving fingers write; and having writ,

Moves on; nor all your piety nor wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,

Nor all your tears wash out a word of it.

In this realm of morals, what the moving finger writes is up to you. if people would just stop to think of the endless consequences that one wrong decision can have, they would be a lot of less likely to leap before they look.

4. SPEAK OUT:

The fourth thing you can do to strengthen of honesty is to speak out forcibly against dishonesty wherever you come into contact with it.

Sometimes you have to do more than merely speak out-you have to take decisive action. All often people seem to be paralyzed. When confronted with criminal acts of injustice or violence. Something in them turns away. They don’t want to get involved.

5. BE PREPARED FOR SOME MOMENTS OF LONELINESS:

If your loneliness is the result of some difficult but honourable choice, He knows about it and loves you for it. Not only that, there are always people who admire right doing and support it in their hearts, even though they are silent.

All this because of one person had the courage to speak out and endure the loneliness-the awful, though temporary loneliness of being in the right.

6. DEMAND THE HIGHEST ETHICAL PERFORMANCE OF YOURSELF:

The individual must set up his own standards and must set them high-this is the theme of this book. an only you, as an individual, can do it. the preacher can preach, the writer can write, the moralist can exhort. But nothing will happen unless the individual says to himself,

I choose.

I choose the higher path.

I choose a more difficult goal.

Of my own free will, I choose it.

“choose you this day.” says the Bible, “Whom ye will serve.” Will it be good, or will it be evil?

With respect.

The author also gives a few memos for every chapter to the readers.

You know, whenever I try to write a book or prepare a sermon I like to visualize the audience—you. I like to think of you as a friend, sitting with me, listening to me, talking back to me once in a while. That way I feel closer to you, I hope you feel closer to me.

From the start, I knew that this was going to be a demanding book. it wasn’t merely going to say things that the reader could agree with, nod and his head sagely nod turn the page unchanged. It was going to ask him to survey himself-with discontent. It was going to call on him to do something about his personality and his character and the innermost fiber of his being that is to say his soul.

Would people be willing to respond to such a challenge?

Would they even want to try?

These questions troubled me!

So, if you are going forward into this book with me, don’t look for magic formulas or easy answers.

You won’t find them here! What you will find, I believe, is a challenge so exciting and rewarding that it may change your thinking and attitudes and your whole outlook in the greatest adventures of life.

So, in the remainder of this book, let’s explore these major areas of living that all of us share-marriage, family, children, love health, sex and the rest and see if we can’t apply some of Tennyson’s wisdom to them. And let’s start with one of the most fundamental areas of all: personal honesty in daily life.

First, we must convince people that dishonesty is not only a form of anarchy that can destroy society, it is also a kind of psychic poison that is extremely bad for them as human beings.

Next, we must make them understand that external forms of coercion-the laws, the police, and son on-can never do the job alone, that in the end it always comes down to the individual’s free choices to act honestly or dishonesty. And we must make them feel the excitement and vitality and power of satisfaction that comes from making the right choices.

Finally, we must show them how to evaluate their own performance in his all improvement areas of living, and how to improve it if it needs improving.
MAKES NO MISTAKES ABOUT IT: Any kind of dishonesty cripples you, and the first thing you lose your freedom.

BOOK OF PSALMS: Blessed is the man who walketh not in the counsel of the ungodly, nor standeth in the way of sinners, nor sitteth in the seat of scornful. 

As a matter of fact, a lot of people who make one such mistake never repeat it.

J. Arthur Rank, the greatest film producer, always ask himself one question before he makes a decision. Not “Is this potential profitable?” or “Will it be a success?” but simply “Is it right?” 

“Be sure that what you do is right”.

With respect.

HOW TO ACHIEVE SELF-KNOWLEDGE AND LIVE A JOYOUS, DISCIPLINED AND ABUNDANT LIFE.

BY THE- FAMOUS NEW BEST SELLER OF POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING-NORMAN VINCENT PEALE.

The book will teach you:

1. The one-minute investment that can the biggest dividend in the world.
2. How to make a no-nonsense moral inventory of your own life.
3. Six secrets that build the will power on which success depends today.
4. The five wizards’ words that can change your life.

I would love to share those life-changing lovable lines that gonna impact in your life.

Dr Norman Vincent Peale (1898–1993) was a minister and author (most notably of The Power of Positive Thinking) and a progenitor of the theory of “positive thinking”.

Peale was born in Bowersville, Ohio. He graduated from Bellefontaine High School, Bellefontaine, Ohio. He has earned degrees at Ohio Wesleyan University (where he became a brother of the Fraternity of Phi Gamma Delta) and Boston University School of Theology.

Raised as a Methodist and ordained as a Methodist minister in 1922, Peale changed his religious affiliation to the Reformed Church in America in 1932 and began a 52-year tenure as pastor of Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan. During that time the church’s membership grew from 600 to over 5000, and he became one of New York City’s most famous preachers.

The author with the problems of moral crisis around us.

Everywhere I went, it seemed, people were asking me what wrong with America-indeed what was wrong with the world. Divorce statistics, crime statistics, the erosion of honesty, race relations, the collapse of sex morals- these and a thousand of other proof of modern man’s inability to cope with himself or his environment were constantly being brought to my attention with earnest and anxious pleas for an explanation or the solution. And I knew when I was really with honest with myself that I was not supplying the answers.

So, when I’m troubled, I try to leave the teeming city with its noise and confusion and go back to the Sugar Tree Farm. And even if the troubled do not go away, something in my soul almost always find the strength and the serenity to endure them.

For a while I sat on my desk, trying to outline the nest Sunday’s sermon. In my pocket was a fragment that I had torn that morning from a metropolitan newspaper. It was an advertisement- a big bold one. For a book that has been known for the decades as one of the literature’s most lurid examples of pornography. The advertisement stated triumphantly that New York had ruled that the book could be sold without hindrance.

Too much of weighing on my mind. Finally, I left my desk and went out on the front porch. Beyond the great barn, a full moon was rising, soft on the gentle hills. The scene was tranquil and familiar and the full of peace.

But, I remembered a man come up to me after my last speaking engagement in a Midwestern town.

“Doctor,” he said abruptly, “do you think we have had it?”

I asked him what he meant, although I was fairly sure that I knew. “Look around you,” he said,

Amost angrily.

“Can’t you read the signs? We’re rich and powerful and prosperous, sure. But so was Babylon. So was Rome. Where will this country be a hundred years from now? Or even fifty? You know what I think? I think god is fed up with us!”

I could still see that man’s face, still, hear his voice.

I came to a place where the road frocked, and stopped. Here I was, a sovereign human being. I could choose to go left. Or I could choose to go right. No authority was there to compel me. No law of gravity was tugged me. Or the other. I was free to choose from.

This freedom…… something seemed to glimmer in my mind. Wasn’t it possible that much of the moral confusion of our time was the result of the too much freedom, achieved too suddenly? Wasn’t it possible that in rebelling against the old authoritarianism of the past, a man had neglected his own controls? Wouldn’t that explain these signs of apparent degenerations, these stupid, harmful, selfish acts that distressed all thinking? God-fearing people?

I turned back towards the lights of the Sugar Tree Farm with the hundred splintered thoughts whirling in my mind. The collapse of external restraints combined with the absence of internal disciplines-could not explain most of the problems of our time.

From race riots to divorces to income tax cheating was there any area of modern life where this interpretation failed to fit?

And if it did fit, might not a book be written that would take up a major area of modern life. -marriages, family relations, personal honesty, sex attitudes-examine the erosion there, and suggest what a person might do reverse the trend my strengthening and disciplining himself?

It was out of the thoughts and emotions of that soft spring night that the decision to write the book was born. Much what I shall have to say in the following pages may sound somber and discouraging. But I write with the feeling of enormous feelings and confidence.

It will never be easy. It requires courage and sacrifice and struggle. From that struggle whose who undertake it, will come an enormous surge of strength and self-confidence.

He who rules his spirit, “says the Bible, “is better than he who takes a city.” Along this path of individual self-mastery, I truly believe, lies the destiny and salvation of our modern world.

To be continued,

With respect.