WHAT IS YOUR NEED.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 443, 10 December 1908, Page 4

WHAT IS YOUR NEED.

(By Ella Wheeler Wilcox)

You are wanting something today. - You want it, and you are certain life will never mean real happiness until that one thing is given you. But are you sure it would mean happiues if it were given you ? A few years ago a young millionaire wanted a certain woman for his wife. Pie married her. A short time afterward two other young millionaires wanted two other women for their life companions. Both obtained their heart’s desire; two of them through much trouble. All three are separated to-day, after living in great unhappiness for years. No one of these three men was capable of knowing what he really needed in life ; they only knew' what they wanted.

A young woman started out in life with beauty, a good name, and money enough to give her every luxury. She believed she wanted the love of a certain young man to complete her happiness. Before she fulfilled her promise to become his wife she met a man of large wealth, and concluded that was what she needed to be happy. The man died and left her a beautiful widow with a vast fortune. Then she wanted the husband of another woman. She obtained her heart’s desire ; and now her one wish is to get rid of this man. She is doing it (or he is ridding himself of her) through nauseating scandal and publicity. All these unfortunates began life with what is called “a silver spoon in the mouth ” ; indeed, with a golden spoon, so set with jewels that it made their mouths callous and incapacitated them from getting the right taste of happiness. If you are longing for wealth as your heart's desire —just moneybags and banks and mines of money —you would do wisely to stop and ask yourself what you would do with the money. Unless you have mentally and spiritually and morally and physically fitted yourself to be God’s dispenser of wealth, you would make yourself and others miserable with great wealth.

The whole trouble with the wretched and miserable crowd of this country’s multi-millionaires whose domestic troubles, have made a stench in the public nostrils for so long, is their utter lack of the sense of personal responsibility. Tney have an idea that money buys everything and makes up for all sins of omission. They fling money to agents to give to the poor, so that poverty may be lessened in the world ; but they do not for a moment consider that they owe the world a larger obligation than this—that of self-controlled, sane, clean, decent, useful lives. That is what God wants, and what society and the world need. No amount of charitable gifts to the poor can make up for the lack of such citizens in the world. If you are such a citizen, and it your life is built on the foundation of just, sensible and wholesome ideals ; if you have cultivated gratitude, appreciation, cheerfulness, hope, and courage, then you possess all the powers that make the magnet for success. You can and will draw to yourself, what you need, and it will never turn to Dead Sea fruit on your Ups. It is only the things we want and do not need which do that. If you have not built such a foundation for your life, wealth could do you no more good than it is doing those whose miseries fill our daily papers And the oue important thing for you to do is to begin a little homegardening. Dig over the soil of your mind with the harrow of selfanalysis ; plant seeds of faith in eternal laws of gratitude for your blessings, of belief in your future. Water the ground with the dews of prayers, and wait with patience, and your harvest shall grow and bring your heart’s desire.—New York American.