Where No Fear Was | Page 8

away from me because I have sinned; and I
can pray that He will lead me into light and strength.
And thus it is not my vulnerability that I dread; I rather welcome it as a
sign that I may learn the truth so. And I will not look upon my desire

for pleasant things as a proof that I am evil, but rather as a proof that
God is showing me where happiness lies, and teaching me by my
mistakes to discern and value it. He could make me perfect if He would,
in a single instant. But the fact that He does not, is a sign that He has
something better in store for me than a mere mechanical perfection.

V
THE USE OF FEAR

The advantages of the fearful temperament, if it is not a mere
unmanning and desolating dread, are not to be overlooked. Fear is the
shadow of the imaginative, the resourceful, the inventive temperament,
but it multiplies resource and invention a hundredfold. Everyone knows
the superstition which is deeply rooted in humanity, that a time of
exaltation and excitement and unusual success is held to be often the
prelude to some disaster, just as the sense of excitement and buoyant
health, when it is very consciously perceived, is thought to herald the
approach of illness. "I felt so happy," people say, "that I was sure that
some misfortune was going to befall me--it is not lucky to feel so
secure as that!" This represented itself to the Greeks as part of the
divine government of the world; they thought that the heedless and
self-confident man was beguiled by success into what they called ubris,
the insolence of prosperity; and that then atae, that is, disaster, followed.
They believed that the over-prosperous man incurred the envy and
jealousy of the gods. We see this in the old legend of Polycrates of
Samos, whose schemes all succeeded, and whose ventures all turned
out well. He consulted a soothsayer about his alarming prosperity, who
advised him to inflict some deliberate loss or sacrifice upon himself; so
Polycrates drew from his finger and flung into the sea a signet-ring
which he possessed, with a jewel of great rarity and beauty in it. Soon
afterwards a fish was caught by the royal fisherman, and was served up
at the king's table--there, inside the body of the fish, was the ring; and
when Polycrates saw that, he felt that the gods had restored him his gift,
and that his destruction was determined upon; which came true, for he
was caught by pirates at sea, and crucified upon a rocky headland.
No nation, and least of all the Greeks, would have arrived at this theory

of life and fate, if they had not felt that it was supported by actual
instances. It was of the nature of an inference from the facts of life; and
the explanation undoubtedly is that men do get betrayed, by a constant
experience of good fortune, into rashness and heedlessness, because
they trust to their luck and depend upon their fortunate star.
But the man who is of an energetic and active type, if he is haunted by
anxiety, if his imagination paints the possibilities of disaster, takes
every means in his power to foresee contingencies, and to deal
cautiously and thoroughly with the situation which causes him anxiety.
If he is a man of keen sensibilities, the pressure of such care is so
insupportable that he takes prompt and effective measures to remove it;
and his fear thus becomes an element in his success, because it urges
him to action, and at the same time teaches him the need of due
precaution. As Horace wrote:
"Sperat infestis, metuit secundis Alteram sortem."
"He hopes for a change of fortune when things are menacing, he fears a
reverse when things are prosperous." And if we look at the facts of life,
we see that it is not by any means the confident and optimistic people
who succeed best in their designs. It is rather the man of eager and
ambitious temperament, who dreads a repulse and anticipates it, and
takes all possible measures beforehand to avoid it.
We see the same principle underlying the scientific doctrine of
evolution. People often think loosely that the idea of evolution, in the
case, let us say, of a bird like a heron, with his immobility, his long legs,
his pointed beak, his muscular neck, is that such characteristics have
been evolved through long ages by birds that have had to get their food
in swamps and shallow lakes, and were thus gradually equipped for
food-getting through long ages of practice. But of course no particular
bird is thus modified by circumstances. A pigeon transferred to a fen
would not develop