eit betray him. He never feels safe. Dishonesty in all its phases
is fatal to happiness, for no dishonest person can get his
self-approval. Without this no happiness is possible.

Before you can be really happy, my friend, you must be able to look
back upon a well-spent past, a conscientious, unselfish past. If not,
you will be haunted by demons which will destroy your happiness. If
you have been mean and selfish, greedy and dishonest with your
fellowmen, all sorts of horrible things will rise out of your money
pile to terrify and to make your happiness impossible.

In other words, happiness is merely a result of the life work. It will
partake of the exact quality of the motive which you have put into your
life work. If these motives have been selfish, greedy, grasping, if
cunning and dishonesty have dominated in your career, your happiness
will be marred accordingly.

You can not complain of your happiness, because it is your own child,
the product of your own brain, your own effort. It has been made up of
your motives, colored by your life aim. It exactly corresponds to the
cause which produced it.

There is the greatest difference in the world between the happiness
which comes from a sweet, beautiful, unselfish, helpful, sympathetic,
industrious, honorable career, and the mean satisfaction which may grow
to be a part of your marked self if you have lived a selfish, grasping
life.

What we call happiness is the harvest from our life sowing, our
habitual thought-sowing, deed-doing. If we have sown selfish, envious,
jealous, revengeful, hateful seeds, greedy, grasping seeds, we can not
expect a golden happiness harvest like that which comes from a clean
and unselfish, helpful sowing.

If our harvest is full of the rank, poisonous weeds of jealousy, envy,
dishonesty, cunning, and cruelty, we have no one to blame but
ourselves, for we sowed the seed which produced that sort of a harvest.

Somehow some people have an entirely wrong idea of what real happiness
is. They seem to think it can be bought, can be had by influence, that
it can be purchased by money; that if they have money they can get that
wonderful, mysterious thing which they call happiness.

But happiness is a natural, faithful harvest from our sowing. It would
be as impossible for selfish seed, greed seed to produce a harvest of
contentment, of genuine satisfaction, of real joy, as for thistle seeds
to produce a harvest of wheat or corn.