How can I make life yield its fullest and the best? How can I know the true secret of power? How can I attain a true and lasting greatness? How can I fill the whole of life with happiness, peace, joy, and satisfaction that is ever rich and abiding, that ever increases, never diminishes, that imparts to it a sparkle that never loses its luster, that always fascinates, never wearies?
No questions, perhaps, in this form or in that have been asked oftener than these. Millions in the past have asked them. Millions are asking them today. They will be asked by millions yet unborn. Is there as answer, a true and safe one for the millions yet unborn who will as eagerly strive to find it as the years come and go? Are you interested, in the answer? The fact that you have read even thus far in this little volume whose title has let you to take it up, indicates that you are – that you are but on of the innumerable company already mentioned.
It is but another way of asking that great question that has come through all the ages – “What is the summum bonum in life?” And there have been countless numbers who gladly would have given all they possessed to have had the true and satisfactory answer. Can we then find this answer; true and satisfactory to ourselves, surely the most precious and valuable of life itself. There is answer: follow closely, and that our findings may be the more conclusive.
There is one great, one simple principle, which, if firmly taken hold of, and if made the great central principle in one’s life, around which all others properly arrange and subordinate themselves, will make that life a grand success, truly great and genuinely happy, loved and blessed by all in just the degree in which it is laid hold upon. A principle which, if universally made thus, would wonderfully change this old world in which we live, that would transform it almost in a night, and it is for its coming that the world has long been waiting. That in place of the gloom and despair in almost countless numbers of lives would bring light and hope and contentment, and no longer would it be said as so truly today, that “man’s inhumanity to man makes countless thousands mourn”; that would give us a nation of statesmen in place of a nation of politicians, each one bent upon his own personal aggrandisement at the expense of the general good; that would go very far toward solving our social problems; that, in short, would make each man a prince among men, and each woman a queen among women.