The Power of Sincerity & Authenticity

Podcast Transcript: Welcome to the Inspirational Living podcast. Coming up this weekend on Our Sunday Talks we’ll be discussing Spirituality & The Creative Mind, as viewed in the writings of Ernest Holmes, a fascinating figure from the New Thought school which flourished during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. To learn how you can gain access to our Sunday series, dedicated to spiritual topics, please visit LivingHour.org/Sunday.

Now, on to today’s reading, which was edited and adapted from The Eight Pillars of Prosperity, by James Allen, published in 1911.

Human society is held together by its sincerity. A universal falseness would beget a universal mistrust, which in turn would bring about a universal separation, if not destruction. Life is made sane, wholesome, and happy, by our deep rooted belief in one another.

It is easy for the insincere to imagine that everybody is like themselves, and to speak of the “rottenness of society.” People who cannot see anything good in the constitution of human society, should overhaul themselves. Their trouble is near home. They call good, evil. They have dwelt cynically and peevishly on evil till they cannot see good, and everything and everybody appears evil.

“Society is rotten from top to bottom”, I heard a man say recently; and he asked me if I did not think so too. I replied that I should be sorry to think so; that while society had many blemishes, it was sound at the core, and contained within itself the seeds of perfection.

An individual of profound sincerity is a great moral force, and there is no force — not even the highest intellectual force — that can compare with it. Men and women are powerful in influence according to the soundness and perfection of their sincerity. Morality and sincerity are so closely bound up together, that where sincerity is lacking, morality (as a power) is lacking also — for insincerity undermines all the other virtues, so that they crumble away and become of no account.

Even a little insincerity robs a character of all its nobility, and makes it common and contemptible. I remember once a friend of mine telling me how she was very pleased by the attentions she was receiving from a particular gentleman, but that she would not marry him. “Why not?” I asked. “Something about him doesn’t ring true”, she replied.

Ring true, now that is a term full of meaning. It harkens back to the old silver coins which, when tested by their ring, emitted a sound that revealed the sterling metal throughout, without the adding of any base material. By its ring, we knew that the coin came up to the standard, and would pass anywhere and everywhere for its full value.

So it is, with men and women. Their words and actions emit their own peculiar influence. There is in them an inaudible sound which all others inwardly hear and instinctively detect. We know the false ring from the true, yet know not how we know. As the outer ear can make the most delicate distinctions in sounds, so the inner ear can make equally subtle distinctions between souls.

The soul’s judgement is perfect; so perfect than in literature, art, science, invention, religion — in every department of knowledge — it divides the good from the bad, the worthy from the unworthy, the true from the false, zealously guarding and preserving the former, and allowing the latter to perish.

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