If you are ever to be a magnet you are one NOW. _All_ that comes _is_
"your fault." If anything different comes it will come through _your_
change of mental attitude and action.

It will not do to throw it on "Karma" either, and say you are receiving
now the unpleasant things deserved in a previous state of existence. The
mills of the gods grind slowly but they are not so dead slow as all
that. What you thought and did in a previous state has determined your
parentage and childhood environment in this. But the pangs you suffer
today have their roots in yesterday or day before, or the year before
that. Cause and effect trip close upon each other's heels--so close that
the careless or ignorant observer misses the trip. He exaggerates the
_effect_ if it be an unhappy one, and goes nosing for a bigger cause
than the real one. How could _his_ little slip of this morning, or
yesterday, be the cause of this _terrible_ evil which has befallen
him?--and he slides completely over the real cause. _And keeps on
repeating it_.

Self-righteousness, by blinding your eyes to the truth, is the direct
cause of the most gigantic and the most subtle miseries of the world.
These awfully good people who fully realize how hard they have always
tried to do right, are the unhappiest people in the world--unless I
except Tom, Dick, Harry and Fan, the victims of these self-righteous
reformers. No, I can't even except these; for they at least generally
succeed in having their own way in spite of the would-be reformer. But
what so utterly disheartening as continued _lack of success_? And the
self-righteous one never succeeds. It is hard, _hard_, to be so wise and
willing, with such _high_ ideals (the self-righteous one in» strong on
ideals), and _never_ to succeed in making Tom, Dick and Harry conform to