The Sermon on the Mount_ The Key to Success in Life - Emmet Fox [25]
On the other hand, by accepting the error and by thinking about it, you are incorporating it into your mentality, and, if you go on doing this for long enough, it may be exceedingly difficulty to get rid of it. Most of us realize this to our cost. We find it comparatively easy, once we have learned to pray scientifically, to overcome new difficulties as they present themselves; but the older ones whose position we have fortified by long acceptance are difficult to dislodge.
Jesus, in accordance with his usual custom when he wished to drive home a particularly important point, employed a graphic illustration from the everyday life of the people around him. In those times the law governing debtors was extremely severe. When a man found himself in debt, it strongly behooved him to come to terms with his creditor by any acceptable means, and as quickly as possible. Even at the present day it is highly important for the debtor to keep his case from coming into court if possible—because there are such things as costs. These are added to the original debt, and the longer the case drags on the more do lawyers’ fees, court dues, and expenses of various kinds accumulate, all piled on top of the debt proper. Indeed, cases are cited where the costs involved in legal proceedings actually exceeded the original debt itself. So it is with the various difficulties that present themselves to us in our daily lives. The original difficulty as it first appeared usually becomes multiplied may times by our wrong thoughts concerning it, and we do not go free until the whole debt is cleared. By coming to terms with the adversary in the first place, that is to say, by getting our thought right immediately concerning the difficulty, we incur no “costs” and the transaction remains a simple one.
Let us suppose that you find yourself sneezing. If you say “There, now I have caught cold again; now I am in for it!” and then proceed, as people so often do, to dwell upon the thought that you have caught cold, and on the various inconveniences that will probably follow upon that, you are giving the trouble the opportunity to dig itself in to your mentality. People often go on from this to indulge in quite a meditation upon sickness in general, and colds in particular. They will think over the previous few days to discover when they caught cold, and they will probably decide with considerable satisfaction that it must be due to that open window on Tuesday, or to sitting, on Wednesday, in the company of a friend who already had a cold; and so forth. Then perhaps they go on to think over several so-called remedies which, however, they have found in the past to be useless. Very frequently they will actually speculate as to how long the coming cold will probably last, usually appointing some definite time such as ten days or two weeks, which, for some reason or other, they suppose to be the natural duration of a cold. In certain cases they even go beyond this, having built up a habit of associating certain secondary ailments with the cold proper, such as bronchitis, temporary deafness, stomach trouble, or whatnot. Now we have seen that this is the very way in which to produce all these things and, therefore, it follows as a natural consequence that, in due order, they put in their appearance as per schedule.
If such a person has some general knowledge of Truth, he will, after thinking in this way for some time, begin to treat himself spiritually as best he can. But by this time he will have amplified the error so strongly, will have allowed it so to dig itself in, that the handling of his cold will be really quite a difficult business. If, upon the error first presenting itself to his consciousness—if, that is to say, at the first moment that the possibility of catching cold occurred to him, either through sneezing or feeling chilly—he had immediately rejected