certainly
not pay you for something you do not give
him.
Here is that saying in the business world again, that you cannot get something for nothing. You cannot. This means that you cannot get salary or wages for something you do not do. Do you think you see men getting paid for something they are not delivering? Watch them. Watch the loafers and the quitters and the "Soldiers."
But there is a deeper thing under this fact and these appearances than people commonly think. It is this: Justice! Justice does work in the affairs of men, whether they recognize it or not. You do not believe it? Study it. Men do get what they want--what they really want. You can get what you really want, as we have said--and you will get it, whether you know it or not!
"But," you say, "just as good men have failed of their aim as have succeeded." So? What does it mean to be "good"? Goodness, in the ordinary sense, has nothing to do with the matter. If it had, we could not understand the situation at all. People who try to explain success or failure on the ground of goodness never do understand it--nor anything else they try to explain on the same ground. Because "goodness" or "badness" in the ordinary moral sense is not the reason. Law is the reason, for everything.
"Whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive." Real virtue consists in keeping in harmony with the law--or trying to. Goodness, in this
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