The Conquest of Fear Part 14

XVI

A revolution indeed is needed; but a revolution in point of view.

Political revolution, for the sake of righting governmental abuses, has been known to produce beneficent results.

Material revolution, the attack of the poor on the rich to take away their possessions, has never achieved anything. Many a time it has been tried, and many a time it has failed. Being part of the system of Mammon it could do nothing else than fail. The evils which Mammon has wrought Mammon will never remedy. There may be instances in history of economic cures for economic ills; but I think they are few. In general such cures are of the nature of our "settlements" of strikes. They settle to-day what is again unsettled to-morrow, leaving the work to be done all over again, and so on into a far future.

The revolution in point of view has these great advantages:

First, it contains within it the seeds of success, since it is revolution toward G.o.d, the owner of the Earth and the fulness thereof; Next, it takes place within the individual himself, doing no one else any harm;

Lastly, it does not run counter to man's economic laws; it only uses and transcends them. It directs and corrects them. Working along their lines it stimulates their fruit. Letting the inner man out of the economic trap it sets him in a world in which first, and last, and before everything else, he is G.o.d's servant in G.o.d's pay. G.o.d's pay being sure, and paid in the way we need it, we no longer have money-fear to be afraid of. Money-fear being set aside we can the more easily give ourselves to the knowledge that "the Kingdom of G.o.d does not consist of eating and drinking, but of right conduct, peace, and joy, through the Holy Spirit; and whoever in this way devotedly serves Christ, G.o.d takes pleasure in him, and men commend him highly."[32]

[32] Epistle to the Romans.

XVII

And lest what I have said should seem fanciful or chimerical let me add that I am not saying these things merely on my own responsibility. To my certain knowledge there are hundreds of thousands--some millions--of people throughout the world who at this very minute are living according to this principle, and proving that it works in practical effect.

Neither am I speaking theoretically, as I have tried to make plain. To a degree that convinces myself I have made the demonstration. Where my life was like a dark and crooked lane in which I might easily be lost, it has now become as an easy and open highway; where money-fear was the very air I breathed, it is now no more than a nebulous shred on a far horizon. Money-fear comes occasionally; but only as the memory of pain to a wound which you know to be healed. It comes; but, like Satan out of Heaven, I can cast it from me with a thought.

CHAPTER VII

THE FALSE G.o.d OF FEAR AND THE FEAR OF DEATH

I

The fear of death was greatly diminished for me on grasping the principle of everlasting Growth.

This principle we gather from whatever we know of life. Our observation of life is, of course, limited to this planet; but as far as it goes it shows us a persistent and perpetual system of development. We have only to let our imaginations go back to the first feeble stirrings of life in the ooze of the primeval seas, contrasting that with what it became in Plato, Sophocles, St. Peter, St. Paul, Raphael, Shakespeare, and Darwin, to see how high the climb upward has reached. Jesus of Nazareth I put on a plane to which we have not yet attained, though in sight as the great objective.

II

That the same law operates in the individual life is a matter of everyone's experience. Such knowledge as each man has of himself is that of a growing ent.i.ty. Each year, each day, expands him a little further, with increased fulness of character. At thirty he is more than he was at twenty; at fifty more than he was at thirty; at eighty more than he was at fifty. Nothing but a perverted mortal point of view stands in the way of further expansion still.

The perverted mortal point of view is one of the impulses we have to struggle with. The mortal tendency, which means the deadly tendency, always seeks to kill whatever has the principle of life. This tendency is in every one of us; but in some of us more than in others.

You can see it at work in the morbid mind, in the mind that is easily depressed, and in the mind that easily closes.

Perhaps it is in this last that it becomes our most pernicious enemy.

The closing mind is found in all our ranks; the closed mind is the deadwood of all our professions. It is not only deadwood; it is death-in-life, the foe of the developing life-principle, the enemy of the Holy Ghost.

That the dead mind should be found among people who have had few intellectual advantages is not surprising. On them it is forced from without, by sheer pressure of circ.u.mstance. Where it is most painful is precisely where it does most harm, among the cla.s.ses we call professional. There, too, it seems commonest. Lawyers, doctors, clergymen, teachers, writers, politicians, business men with dead minds choke all the highways of life. To the extent that they have influence they are obstacles to progress; but sooner or later the time comes when they no longer have influence. Life shelves them on the plea that they are old; but that is not the reason. They are shelved because they have killed their minds, becoming living dead men.

As a matter of fact, one of the most valuable of our social and national a.s.sets is the old man who has kept his mind open. Found all too rarely, he is never shelved, for the reason that life cannot do without him. Having the habit of expansion he continues to expand, keeping abreast of youth and even a little in advance of it. The exception rather than the rule, there is no reason why he should not be the racial type.

III

He is not the racial type because so many of us begin to die almost as soon as we have begun to live. Our very fear of the death-principle admits it into our consciousness. Admitted into our consciousness it starts its work of killing us. It wrinkles the face, it turns the hair grey, it enfeebles the limbs, it stupefies the brain. One of its most deadly weapons is fatigue, or the simulation of fatigue. The tired business man, who rules American life, is oftener than not a dead business man. If he looked ahead he would see what we idiomatically know as his "finish." He is not only dying but he infuses death into manners, literature, and art, since he so largely sets the standard which becomes the rule.

War on the death-principle should be, it seems to me, one of the aims to which the individual gives his strength; and once more he can do it on his own account.

In the first place, he can watch himself, that he does not mentally begin to grow old. To begin mentally to grow old is to begin mentally to die. He must think of himself as an expanding being, not as a contracting one. He must keep in sympathetic touch with the new, d.a.m.ning the know-it-all frame of mind. He must keep in sympathetic touch with youth, knowing that youth is the next generation in advance. The secrets of one generation are not those of another; but if he who possesses the earlier masters also the later he is that much the richer and wiser. The gulf which separates parents and children is one which the parents must cross. They can work onward, while the children cannot work backward. Up to a certain point the older teach the younger; beyond a certain point the younger teach the older. He who would go on living and not begin to die must be willing to be taught, reaping the harvest of both youth and age.

In the second place, he who would live must not kill anyone else. The deadly tendency in ourselves is forever at work on those about us, chiefly on those we love. We watch, tabulate, and recount their symptoms of decay. Making notes of them for ourselves we discourse of them to others. "He begins to look old," is a commonplace. The response will probably emphasise the fact. By response to response we spin round a friend the age-web which lengthens into the death-web. In our expressive American vernacular we speak of "wishing" conditions on others, an instinctive folk-recognition of the force of mentality. We do it in a sinister sense more often than by way of helpfulness. We "wish" by thinking, by talking, by creating an atmosphere, by forcing things into the general consciousness. Old age and decay, bad enough in themselves, we intensify by our habits of mind. Death, which in any case awaits our friends, we woo to them by antic.i.p.ations of demise. It is not ill-intentioned. It comes out of a subconsciousness in which death and not life is the base.

IV

For most of us the fear of death is a subconscious rather than an active fear. It becomes active for those who through illness, or in some other way, see a sentence of death hanging over them; but during the greater part of the life-span we are able to beat it off.

As to the life-span itself there is reason to suppose that it is meant to be more regular than man allows it to become. There may easily be an "appointed time" to which we do not suffer ourselves, or each other, to attain. Those strange, inequalities by which one human being is left to pa.s.s over the century mark, another is cut off just when he is most needed, while a third does no more than touch this plane for an hour or two, may be the results of our misreadings of G.o.d's Will, and not the decrees of that Will itself.

We are here on ground which may be termed that of speculation; and yet speculation is not quite the right word. I dare to think that we have reached a stage of our development at which we are ent.i.tled to make with regard to death certain inferences which were hardly possible before our time. We may make them timidly, with all hesitation and reserve, aware that we cannot propound them as facts; and yet we may make them. The human mind is no longer where it was a hundred years ago, still less where it was five hundred years ago. Though we make little progress we make some. We are not always marking time on the same spot of ignorance and helplessness. What is mystery for one age is not of necessity mystery for another. Even when mysteries remain, they do not of necessity remain without some hint of a dawn which may broaden into day.

Many of our most precious illuminations have come in just this way; a faint light--which slowly, feebly, through centuries perhaps, waxes till it becomes a radiance.

V

I talked some time ago to an orthodox Christian lady whose brother had recently died, and who was speaking of death.

"The one mystery," she called it, "on which no single ray of light has been vouchsafed in all the ages man has been on earth."

I did not agree with her, but knowing her to be an orthodox Christian lady I did not venture to express my opinion.

But hers is the position which many, perhaps most, of us take. "No one has ever come back," we say, "to tell us what his experience has been,"

and we drop the subject there. Not only do we drop the subject there, but we resent it if everyone else does not drop the subject there. "G.o.d has hidden it from us," we declare, "and what He has hidden from us it is presumption for us to pry into." It is useless to urge the fact that this way of reasoning would have kept us still in the Stone Age; we are not to be reached by argument.