The inner life that is lived--the life of thought, purpose, aspiration, and prayer--dominates and determines the outer life. It creates it. And when one feels helplessly drifting, at the mercy of events, his only safety lies in a more positive and abounding energy; in deeper purpose and a firmer grasp on his work, a higher and diviner trend to his thought, and a closer clinging to the divine promises. "In man," says Balzac, "culminates a visible finite universe; in him begins a universe invisible and infinite,--two worlds unknown to each other." But one's life always belongs far more to his future than to his past. He is more closely and truly related to that which he shall be than to that which he has been; as the flower, the plant, the tree, is in more intimate and vital relation with the air and sunshine than with the dark ground in which the seed germinated. It retains its hold on the kingdom of the earth, but it has achieved a new and a higher relation with the kingdom of the air. Man's relations with the invisible and the infinite universe are his truest and most determining relations. And these are governed and are constantly extended by his power of will. The power of will is so akin to the divine energy that it is the power through which, and by means of which, the closest relation with the divine energy can be effected. Man, by the power of will, unites his life with the life of God; he so relates himself to the divine energy that he becomes receptive to it, and when this irresistible force pours itself into his life all nobler realizations become possible; all sublimest aspiration may express itself in the daily quality of life, and fulfil its visions in actual tasks and deeds. Nothing is ever hopeless. There is no situation nor complication that has not its key simply in lifting up the heart to God; in willing, through prayer, to work, as well as to walk, with Him; and in praying, through power of will brought to bear in all its resistless intensity of aspiration, that the power of God may work through all the conditions of the human life. The subjective or subliminal self is capable of extending the mental faculties in a way almost undreamed of by the ordinary consciousness. "There is in the mind a faculty," says a writer on this subject, "which, if it receives the correct impression, is able to correct the mental and physical life of a person and produce a manifest impression on his environment, the secret of which is conscious and concentrated attention under direction of the will of the individual.