How To Stop Worrying And Start Living

that where I am, there ye may be also." Then we all knelt down before our chairs in that lonely Missouri farmhouse and prayed for God's love and protection.

When William James was professor of philosophy at Harvard, he said: "Of course, the sovereign cure for worry is religious faith."

You don't have to go to Harvard to discover that. My mother found that out on a Missouri farm. Neither floods nor debts nor disaster could suppress her happy, radiant, and victorious spirit. I can still hear her singing as she worked: Peace, peace, wonderful peace,

Flowing down from the Father above,

Sweep over my spirit for ever I pray

In fathomless billows of love.

My mother wanted me to devote my life to religious work. I thought seriously of becoming a foreign missionary. Then I went away to college; and gradually, as the years passed, a change came over me. I studied biology, science, philosophy, and comparative religions. I read books on how the Bible was written. I began to question many of its assertions. I began to doubt many of the narrow doctrines taught by the country preachers of that day. I was bewildered. Like Walt Whitman, I "felt curious, abrupt questionings stir within me". I didn't know what to believe. I saw no purpose in life. I stopped praying. I became an agnostic.

I believed that all life was planless and aimless. I believed that human beings had no more divine purpose than had the dinosaurs that roamed the earth two hundred million years ago. I felt that some day the human race would perish-just as the dinosaurs had. I knew that science taught that the sun was slowly cooling and that when its temperature fell even ten per cent, no form of life could exist on earth. I sneered at the idea of a beneficent God who had created man in His own likeness. I believed that the billions upon billions of suns whirling through black, cold, lifeless space had been created by blind force. Maybe they had never been created at all. Maybe they existed for ever-just as time and space have always existed.

Do I profess to know the answers to all these questions now? No. No man has ever been able to explain the mystery of the universe-the mystery of life. We are surrounded by mysteries. The operation of your body is a profound mystery. So is the electricity in your home. So is the flower in the crannied wall. So is the green grass outside your window. Charles F. Kettering, the guiding genius of General Motors Research Laboratories, has been giving Antioch College thirty thousand dollars a year out of his own pocket to try to discover why grass is green. He declares that if we knew how grass

?How To Stop Worrying And Start Living? By Dale Carnegie 98

is able to transform sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide into food sugar, we could transform civilisation.

Even the operation of the engine in your car is a profound mystery. General Motors Research Laboratories have spent years of time and millions of dollars trying to find out how and why a spark in the cylinder sets off an explosion that makes your car run; and they don't know the answer.

The fact that we don't understand the mysteries of our bodies or electricity or a gas engine doesn't keep us from using and enjoying them. The fact that I don't understand the mysteries of prayer and religion no longer keeps me from enjoying the richer, happier life that religion brings. At long last, I realise the wisdom of Santayana's words:

"Man is not made to understand life, but to live it."

I have gone back-well, I was about to say that I had gone back to religion; but that would not be accurate. I have gone forward to a new concept of religion. I no longer have the faintest interest in the differences in creeds that divide the Churches. But I am tremendously interested in what religion does for me, just as I am interested in what electricity and good food and water do for me. They help me to lead a richer, fuller, happier life. But religion does far more than that. It brings me spiritual values. It gives me, as William James puts it, "a new zest for life ... more life, a larger, richer, more satisfying life." It gives me faith, hope, and courage. It banishes tensions, anxieties, fears, and worries. It gives purpose to my life-and direction. It vastly improves my happiness. It gives me abounding health. It helps me to create for myself "an oasis of peace amidst the whirling sands of life".