It gathers size as it doth onward go."

When we make a wish or will, or determine that in future after awaking
we shall be in a given state of mind, we also include Perseverance for
the given time, and as success supposes repetition in all minds, it
follows that Perseverance will be induced gradually and easily.

And here I may remark that while all writers on ethics, duty or
morals, cry continually "Be persevering, be honest, be enterprising,
exert your will!" and so on, and waste thousands of books in
illustrating the advantages of all these fine things, there is not one
who tells us _how_ to practically execute or do them. To follow the
hint of a quaint Sunday School picture, they show us a swarm of Bees,
with hive and honey, but do not tell us how to catch _one_. And yet a
man may be anything he pleases if he will by easy and simple practice
as I have shown, make the conception habitual. I do not tell you as
these good folk do, how to go about it nobly, or heroically, or
piously; in fact, I prescribe a method as humble as making a fire, or
a pair of shoes, and yet in very truth and honor I have profited far
more by it than I ever did from all the exhortations which I ever have
read.

Now there are many men who are not so bad in themselves in reality,
but who are so haunted by evil thoughts, impulses, and desires, that
they, being taught by the absurd old heathenish psychology that the
"soul" is all one spiritual entity, believe themselves to be as wicked
as Beelzebub could wish, when, in fact, these sins are nothing but
evil weeds which came into the mind as neglected seeds, and grew apace
from sheer carelessness. Regarding them in the light, as one may say,
of bodily and material nuisances, or a kind of vermin, they can be