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The wisdom, the breadth of experience and the depth of sympathy that should come with the passing of the years are wonderful and beautiful marks of age. Not so are the broken-down tissues, the sickness and decrepitude. It is possible, so the New Thought teaches, to acquire the beautiful marks and to obliterate the unlovely ones by a proper direction of the Will.

I may know what is ideal, and yet not will to express it in my life. In that case my knowledge does not tend to beauty of expression in my mind and body. I may know that certain thoughts are corrosive and generate poison in my body, and yet I may will to hold such thoughts as the years roll over me, in which event my will is my destroyer. With all the knowledge of Truth that it is possible to gain, one cannot renew or re-create himself to the ideal without using his will. It is either his Savior or his Destroyer.

You can use the will to good effect with very little knowledge, because there is within you an intuitive perception of what is good for you and what is not. You know by the effect of certain thoughts and feelings that they are injurious to you. You know it is not well for you to indulge in spells of depression, of resentment, of envy, anger, anxiety, fear, etc., and you may prefer not to have such thoughts, yet it seems you cannot arouse will enough to expel them. You try once, twice or three times to put out the noxious intruders, and perhaps you succeed for the instant, but back they come trooping, and more "devils" with them, like the unclean spirit of