Analyze your spiritual account. Is your religious belief a sham or a conviction? Do you sing on Sunday, "We shall know each other there," or do you make it a point to know and love your brother here, seven days a week? [Sidenote: Balancing the Statement.] Be fair in your inventory. Write down the facts in the two columns designated "good" and "bad," then go over the list and put a red danger flag on the bad. Keep the list until next inventory and see whether you have made a gain or loss in your net moral standing. Don't read this and say, "A good idea." Do the thing literally. Take a clean sheet of paper and write your personal assets and liabilities down in the two columns marked "good" and "bad." If this inventory doesn't help, then you may call me a false prophet. I know the plan is a good one. I know it will help you. If it helps you, you will thank me. There can be no harm in trying, because it's a worth-while thing to test. The business man who never takes inventory is likely to bump some day. 46. The ego is in us. It is a good thing to have, but egotism needs the soft pedal when we speak or do things. Many people are unconscious of their egotism, yet their conversation carries the suggestion, "Even I, who am superior to the herd, would do this or that." [Sidenote: The Personal Pronoun.] For instance, two persons were arguing about the merits of an inexpensive automobile. Parenthetically, I may say that one belonged to the Ford class, and the other to the can't-afford class. A can't-afford snob came to the rescue of the Ford champion by saying, "That's a good car; why, I wouldn't mind owning one of them myself," and he beamed at the party with the consciousness of having settled the matter and removed the stigma from the Ford car. This egotism often crops out when one shows a group picture in which he appears. He doesn't wait for you to find him; he pokes his arm over your shoulder and says, "That's me." To each of us, in the very nature of things, the "I" is the center of our world. We see things always through our I's. If we wish to get along without friction, we must remember that the other fellow has his I's also, and when we try to make him see things through out I's, it makes trouble. [Sidenote: Good Breeding.] The hall mark of education, refinement and character, in the broad sense, is the ability to exclude the personal so far as possible from our conversation. And be big enough to grant to others their undoubted right to see and think from their own standpoint. Argument develops egotism more than almost anything else will. How often have you convinced another in an argument? How often have you been convinced in an argument? The world is big; there are millions of others in it, and our job is a big one if we 'tend pretty well to our own knittin'. 47. Four hundred and twenty-six years ago Christopher Columbus landed on an island which he thought was India.