Permanent Prosperity

Prosperity is not an accumulation of money or other so-called wealth, as we have sometimes thought. Wouldn’t it really be a terrible thing if we were obliged to be eternally surrounded with the material baubles that we in our childish fancies believe to be prosperity? Wouldn’t you dread to think of spending eternity, with chains of houses and lands, and storehouses of food, and wardrobes of clothing, and garages of cars, and chests of silver? Wouldn’t you dread to think that men and women were always to be deluded with the belief that these formed things are the realities, the truly valuable things of life? Why, we’d always have to be employing guards and giving our thought to caring for our wealth! And we’d never get to the place where we could really get still and learn from the Father the deeper things, the soul-satisfying things—the lessons there are for us ere we arise into the majesty of sonship—the realization of oneness! Let us rejoice then that our resources are the God qualities, the spiritual sources and substances from which our consciousness, our body, our home, come forth in response to our need and our word of faith and wisdom and authority.

Let us rejoice that our good is in the realm of Mind, where it is instantly available and responsive to our thought and word and need. Rejoice that it is all under law, that it holds us to the law, even though a negative attitude does fail to produce desirable results! The lessons of experience are helpful to us until we learn the unchangeableness of the law and determine in our own mind that prosperity is progress, accomplishment of that which one has an urge to do, gain in spiritual, mental, physical or financial matters, attainment of that which is good and needful. Supply in abundance for the so-called temporal needs is a part of prosperity. And surely, since God has given us this physical being, and the physical earth, and all its bounty, it is not wrong for us to get the understanding of the full free use of it all!

If we are ever to understand and use the higher spiritual laws, we must learn to use the laws governing our present state! As we do this, we shall see that they are really different phases of the same law.

“The Lord is more willing to give than we are to receive.”

Myrtle Fillmore

Myrtle Fillmore was one of the founders of the Unity movement, which was founded in Kansas City, Missouri in 1889 after Mrs. Fillmore had been cured of her tuberculosis, she believed, by spiritual healing. This resulted in the Fillmores'(both Charles and Myrtle) studying spiritual healing, and being influenced by Emma Curtis Hopkins. This gradually developed into the Unity movement as the Fillmores attempted to share their insights through magazines, books, and pamphlets and through “Silent Unity,” a telephone and mail service that offered people help through prayer and counseling.