AREVIEW OF THE PRECEDING LESSON will disclose the following summary of that power of the Magnetic Mind that is called the Truth-Teller. It _ is double. On the one hand it is able to discern the truth of the future by applying the experiences of the past. On the other hand it is able to take advantage of its faculty of discernment by possessing the ability to accept the truth of the future as though it had actually already occurred; thus avoiding the reefs and dangerous shoals that are wrecking most lives, and neutralizing the brilliant victories of personal magnetism.

There are more reefs and dangerous shoals in marriage than in any other institution of life; yet, despite opinions to the contrary, they are not hidden, but lie in full sight just below the surface of the shining waters. The victims look afar off and do notsee them; or, being told of them, they say, "Even if so, in our case they will not bring harm." The Physical Mind is swayed by the Four Appetites, or one or more of them. In Lesson 60, just preceding this, there will be found a summary of the processes that develop the Magnetic Mind. Those processes, aided largely by the Regime of Mental Magnitude which is found in Lesson 13, will overcome the influence exerted by the appetites.

If, however, the Physical Mind holds sway, the appetite will bring ruin in ninety percent of marriages. A very large majority of people are or have been married; and the wrecking of this alliance will in nearly every instance, result in harm to those who make the mistake of entering into it ill-advisedly. A mistake avoided is worth a thousand corrected.

We have seen that when ill health brings pain, suffering and physical torture, magnetism is never possible. In like manner mental ill health, such as must attend the wrecking of murried life, brings worries, suffering, anguish, hopeless drifting for years, and loss of ambition to get on in the world until there is the legal separation and the new start at a point far back of that where the first course began. As we have said, a mistake avoided is worth a thousand corrected.

With the Magnetic Mind in control, mistakes need not be corrected; they are avoided. The Truth-Teller has charge of affairs. He shows you facts by asking you questions:

1. You are thinking of marrying a woman whom you say you love. Do you know that love begins at puberty in response to the sexual appetite? That it exists solely as a partner with that condition, is born with it, and cannot live without it! That love is a fever of the nerves tortured by the same appetite? That there is really in fact but the shortest conceivable step from loving and hating? That countless thousands of wives have loved intensely, and suddenly have hated bitterly? That ninety-nine percent of married people have awakened after marriage to find their mistake, all of whom, if forewarned, would have said, "Oh, we know there have been wrecks in millions of other cases, but with us it will be different; we are perfectly mated, and will love each other as long as life shall last and ever after."

2. You are marrying in order to meet the demands of your sexual appetite, and the foregoing inquiries do not deter you, then you will go on to the wreckage we have described in the early part of this lesson. But if you are marrying in order to possess a mate as a loving and sympathetic companion, then let the Truth-Teller analyze the prospects for you, and see if you will take the step. We are discussing the man side first You have found the one woman in this world who was created for you. She is pretty. Is she? Beauty is skin deep. Have you seen her with the paint off? But supposing that in her natural skin, her face is fair, its texture is velvety, and the lines are yet absent, what of those mornings when, after her stomach and liver are upset by indigestion, she is sallow, yellow, jaundiced, of sour breath and fishy eyes, drawn features and sagging jaw, are you then enamored of her beauty? There must be something more than a doll face of velvety texture and smooth surface to hold your love.

3. How about the housework? Can you afford to hire help? If you can, have you the means to pay for them, to feed them, and to house them? If, after paying all your bills as estimated before marriage, and as many more that will arise without being estimated, will you find yourself in debt at the end of each year, or will you come out about even? And are you prepared to meet the cost of emergencies, exigencies and unexpected liabilities that come in flocks to all married couples? If you are in debt, where will you be when old age arrives? If you come out even, where will you be when the same old age arrives? If you save five hundred dollars each year, how many years of smooth financial sailing will be required for you to save up sufficient money to place at interest so that when you are too old to work, you can live on the income? Safe investments do not average much over four percent. Twenty thousand dollars placed at such interest would yield only eight hundred dollars a year; and saving at the rate of five hundred dollars a year would require forty years to provide this sum; with, of course, a slightly larger income from invested interest; but compounding it would not produce enough to enable you to live decently after you are superannuated. Hence the saving of five hundred dollars a year during marriage will not be enough; and the chances are a thousand to one that you will start saving as the man started planting his land, as soon as he caught up with the end of the rainbow. You will be getting ready to start the next year. But if you do not start sometime, woe to you and your old age!

4. All persons wish sooner or later to own their homes; and the Truth-Teller wishes to state that there are overwhelming expenses to be met. In the maintenance of the conduct of the home, if a cook and butler are employed at average wages for the family of average means, it will require what la equal to an investment of thirty thousand dollars to obtain income sufficient to pay them; and if a maid be added, the total capital invested to earn the income to meet their wages must be forty-five thousand dollars. This is for wages alone, and docs not include feeding and other incidental costs arising from the employment The birth of a child today costs hundreds of dollars, not to mention the after expenses of doctor, nurse, clothes and all the vicissitudes that may follow.

5. If you are thinking of building, the Truth-Teller wishes to say that the cost of material is about three hundred percent above normal; and the cost of labor from three hundred to four hundred percent above normal. If you use electric light or have other conveniences, and especially are compelled to hire the services of plumbers, or painters and carpenters for repairs, or even in constructing a house, the wages charped in addition to the swollen prices of material are prohibitive, what is normal? It is argued that if all wage earners and business men and women receive these abnormal prices, then one line of charges will balance the others. But the only test of what is normal comes from dividends from the bonds of the nation and from bonds and stocks of the great typical corporations, such as the steel company, the railroads, the industries and the banking institutions. Taking as the basis the purchase price of such bonds and stocks today, and the dividends that are distributed to owners of them, the average income from these sources is nearer four percent per annum than five; and, while all material and wages have risen from three hundred to four hundred percent over the figures of thirty years ago, the returns from bonds and stocks have been standing still. Yet people may be surprised to learn that ninety percent of all income on which people pay their living expenses comes from these investments; and, when those who now depend on their earnings in other ways, are too old to remain active in business, employment or professional life, ALL their income then must come from similar investments. This is the only way of determining what is normal; and possible bankruptcy must be foreseen as the most dangerous reef of married life until the cost of material and labor shall again become normal. If it requires today four times the earnings of labor or business to equal the value received, excessively high wages and charges bring no advantage, and stand in the way of purchasing living investments as a sufficient protection against old age demands.

We present these abnormal figures because the mental worry that attends the struggle to finance marriage, with the years passing and nothing being laid by against old age, frets husbands and wives until they become nervous and irritable and lose both magnetism and ambition.

6. If you think that two persons can live as cheaply as one by marrying, you should first make estimates of every possible expense that you can think of as pertaining to marriage, and multiply these by four. The Physical Mind cannot be made to believe this; but the Magnetic Mind knows it to be true. We are discussing the average families, not those that are of very limited means. The husband may be in business, or may be employed in a high-salaried position, or may be building up some profession; he is quite sure to be in one of these three vocations. The only point we make in this lesson is that he should know the coat of marriage as it affects him; should every year establish a margin between his income and his expenditures; and should have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he is living within his means, and providing for the future. His exact financial situation should be made known to his wife, for if she is worthy of being a wife she will help him to establish this margin and will glory in their united efforts to succeed.

This is genuine personal magnetism applied to the greatest institution of all time, marriage, and it tends to hold husbands and wives together.

Let them read this lesson together and study its meaning.

Every person should possess a Truth-Teller. It is a section of the mind that is lighted by the highest candle-power known to science; it lights up the past, collects the unvarying facts from that direction, and throws them forward on the screen of the coming years. If these facts have been unvarying in the past, they are sure to remain permanent guides for the future.

In addition to these facts, it reveals the processes of life as they are being unfolded in the present; and shows their infallible control of the future; for it is a law of action that no coming event can originate itself, but must be brought on by a chain of causation from preceding conditions.

The Truth-Teller divides the future of each man and woman into three parts: Possibilities, Probabilities, and Certainties on the bright side; and into three other parts on the dark side: Impossibilities, Improbabilities, and Certainties, the last being certainties of failure.

LESSON SIXTY-TWO - DISCERNING THE TRUTH

STILL GIVING HEED to the Truth-Teller, we look into the homes of those people who have weathered the storms of wedlock and are still united in the same bonds that first made them mates, and that still hold them together. In one town of about two thousand inhabitants whose history we have known personally for over thirty years, there has not been a single divorce, nor a single separation except by death. In this town, less than ten houses are rented in each hundred, the others being owned, some by laborers, some by professional people, some by business men, and some by persons who are employed in offices or otherwise. In every family during the first years of wedlock, there were no servants, the wife doing the housework except the laundry and occasional cleaning, and the husband attending to his duties. In later years a few of the families employed help, but we do not know of a single case where the wife gave up the cooking or superintending it. Eighty percent of these families were affiliated with some church, but less than half of them attended regularly.

In another town of nearly ten thousand inhabitants whose history we have known personally for over thirty years, the same general conditions prevail, and divorce has been almost unknown. Some of the families were well-to-do, and employed servants; but not until later years never more than one regularly. There was a large proportion of church-going people in this town.

From records made in a number of villages, small towns and large towns, grading through small cities up to those of middle size, it has been learned that three factors have tended to keep married people together: the influence of openly observed methods of living, the fact that the wives have been workers in their homes, and the general custom of attending church at least some of the time. We have a list of seven thousand or more small towns where, during a quarter of a century, less than one couple in two hundred have been divorced or separated, where women work in their own homes, and where church influence is active. As the towns become cities, the divorce evil grows with the growth of the latter; we mean pro rata. Thus in any large city the proportion of divorces to those of marriages is the largest of all.

When we come to the study of VALUES we shall see the reason of this increase.

We are now taking a stroll with the Truth-Teller, and will deal with the wrecks that are made in city life among marriages that occur there. For this purpose we will not include wedlock among the poorer classes, as they have wholly different problems to face. We will step up a grade or two higher from the classes which we discussed in the preceding lesson, and find ourselves among the middle ranks of the well-to-do, and also among the rich. The Truth-Teller wishes to call attention to the following varieties of wedded couples:

1. Here is a wealthy merchant who has married a young woman, the latter vowing that she was attracted by her love for him, and not by his wealth. He is still in business, but spends his evenings with her when she is at home or goes to the opera, the theatre, or calling. During the day she loafs, as he can afford to employ servants. On an average they go out two evenings each week, but are at home with each other the remaining five evenings. He sits in the library, reads his paper and falls asleep. She does fancy work or reads a novel, and eventually retires. The opera bores them both. The theatre is barely endurable. Calling is irksome, because it is filled with flattery and insincerity, and is always, perfunctory. There are occasional outings and short vacations. The husband feels that he owns the woman, and she takes advantage of her freedom during the day to form indiscreet acquaintances in order to make tolerable the dull evenings. There is no magnetism; and all VALUES are lacking.

2. In another case a rich broker marries a woman for her extraordinary beauty. He must devote his time during office hours to his work; so she is left to herself, and becomes a loafer. She rises late in the forenoons, after a lazy breakfast in bed gets through some tedious hours until she can call at her beauty parlor, fills in more hours playing bridge, is at home in time for the evening meal, drags her husband to some lascivious dance or cabaret, guzzles liquor, smokes cigarettes despite the well proved fact that these things are responsible for the rapidly increasing spread of cancer among her kind and class, and gets home in the small hours of the morning or later, having spent her vitality and lowered her character in a round of excitement not one of which is wholesome or productive of enjoyment, but all of which are pulling her down to the level of their own origin. When these wives do not die early of cancer, they drift into the lives of libertines, and the history of such women confirms the fact that one hundred percent of them, meaning each and all of their class, either are divorced sooner or later, or openly defy the law. Taking at random the cases of five hundred marriages between men of wealth and women of beauty and cigarettes that occurred in New York City, we find that in exactly five hundred of them the end came in the manner described. There is no other way.

All VALUES are lacking, and magnetism never existed, There was nothing to hold these couples together. They all regretted the marriage after it was too late.

The Truth-Teller is able to discern the truth of the future by the experiences of the past. The Physical Mind will not accept the truth of the future. The Magnetic Mind is endowed with the power to take advantage of its discernment, and to avoid the reefs and dangerous shoals that are wrecking most lives and neutralizing the brilliant victories of personal magnetism.

3. In another variety of cases which we will represent by a sample only, the wife is decent, she does not guzzle liquor nor smoke cigarettes, nor submit herself to the arms of dancing libertines, nor hang around cabarets, nor cultivate indiscreet friendships with other men. Her husband is wealthy. He must be at his office during the hours of the day, and she is left to herself, and becomes unwillingly a loafer. But she is honorable. She is true to her marriage vows. She has but little to interest her. He takes her to the opera at times, but she feels that it is done to enable her to exhibit her fine clothes. A few other diversions fall to her lot. He desires to spend some evenings at home; otherwise home life to him would be narrowed by his absence at his office in the day, and his drifting out at night. So they sit together in a pleasant room. He smokes and reads the papers. She either does some fancy work or reads a novel. They rarely speak, for there is nothing to say. In their individual absorption they do not always remember that they are in each other's presence. Many thousands of moral, decent couples drift their lives away in this dull routine.

In this case all VALUES are lacking, and there is no personal magnetism. In a subsequent lesson we shall see what these values are, and shall note their great influence over the lives of married people.

The Truth-Teller makes known the fact that men who, prior to marriage are free to come and go as they please, night or day, are forced to the humiliation of having to invent explanations to offer their wives in order to account for their wanderings especially after the early morning hours, and are continually in hot water in failing to make their explanations convincing; while, on the other hand, wives are expected to account to their husbands for absences and adventures. Evasions and the humiliation of being compelled to explain one's doings are destructive of magnetism, because they make independence impossible without warfare, which becomes despicable in wedlock.

The Magnetic Mind meets all such contingencies.

The fact that the greatest undertakings in life are totally lacking in VALUES, is due to the substitutes for magnetism that we are trying to expose and avoid by Lessons 12 and 13 of this book. When men and women are influenced in the right direction and for their actual benefit, the influencing power is magnetism; but when they are lured to the shoals of ruin by the power of their appetites, then they find that, the enterprise lacks the VALUES which alone bring success and triumph. This failure brings emptiness of hope, and an ever blunting despair.