Fear of the unknown has given birth to all the superstitions that have
afflicted the minds of ignorant and unthinking people. Few people
escape some form of superstition. For instance, the silly sayings,
anent the moon, "Fair Priestess of the Night." It is unlucky to see it
in its newness--so and so--when the real fact is, it is a merciful
Providence that permits us to see it in any of its phases, over the
left shoulder or over the right, or through the glass, or in any way at
all. There is nothing more "lucky" or glorious than to have good
eyesight of one's own, with which to behold this and all the other
beauties of nature. The man who chanced to be passing under a ladder
just at the moment when a workman half-way up let fall a bucket of
paint which struck and deluged him, had some reason for thinking it
"unlucky" to go under instead of around such an impediment to travel.
But not once in a lifetime would such a thing happen to any one, and it
is impossible to imagine what going under ladders or meeting loads of
barrels, or funerals, or opening umbrellas in the house, instead of
outside of it, or any of the hundreds of silly, puerile, fool
superstitions that have sprung from no one knows where, and that have
no scientific meaning, and no earthly bearing upon the realities of any
life have "to do with the case." These are all the offsprings of minds
tinctured by fear of they know not what, and which are peddled around
and handed down religiously from one generation to another, to keep
alive a sensationalism whose tendency is to blind those who accept them
to the great living fact of God's providence which is and has ever been
ruling the lives of his earthly children.