Sacred Texts: New Thought

Prosperity: Chapter 1

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*Prosperity* (1936) by Charles Fillmore is a work of New Thought spiritual philosophy, specifically within the Christian Science/Unity tradition that Fillmore founded. Its central argument is that material wealth and abundance are spiritually available to all people because "Divine Mind" — identified with God — is an infinite, omnipresent substance underlying all physical reality, and that poverty results not from scarcity but from mistaken thinking. Fillmore draws a sustained parallel between early 20th-century physics (the ether, electromagnetic radiation, atomic energy) and Christian metaphysics, arguing that scientists and Jesus were describing the same invisible, all-providing substrate of reality when physicists spoke of "space" and Jesus spoke of "the kingdom of the heavens." The work's distinctive claim is that prosperity is not a moral reward but a natural, mechanical consequence of aligning one's thoughts and words with abundance — a discipline available to anyone who chooses it, making both poverty and inequality ultimately problems of consciousness rather than economics or politics. Fillmore extends this to social critique, arguing that hoarding wealth violates divine law and harms the hoarder spiritually more than the poor. The text reads as a blend of sermon, metaphysical treatise, and self-help manual, citing scripture, Shakespeare, Sir James Jeans, and experiential testimony in support of a unified theory of mind, matter, and money.

Prosperity: Chapter 1

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