THE SUPERSTITION OF FEAR
Fear of Death thus dies in senseless sleep.
BEAUMONT.
Primitive man feared thunder, and, being unable to explain it, made a
god of it, offered sacrifices to it in the hope of averting the harm it
might do. Fear has perverted many religions. What man feared he first
crouched before in helpless terror, and afterwards knelt before in
wonder and worship. In the early days of the race he looked upon every
new or strange thing with terror, because he did not understand its
connection with the things he knew.
Man first knew himself as a physical creature with certain needs and
cravings that must be gratified if he were to live at all. He did not
at first realize that the presence of another person would make life
easier and more secure for him; rather, he feared that every other
would injure him. Later, as men formed themselves into groups, clans
and tribes, each recognized the interests of the immediate group as of
supreme importance, but feared the other groups. This was the origin
of “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the
land.” Those families that obeyed their natural leader, the patriarch,
held together and survived; the others were separated and destroyed.
The early records of the Jews are scarcely more than a chronicle of
the wars of a coherent race against various other tribes inhabiting
that part of Asia, together with the lessons to be drawn from its
experience. Even in the vast new continent of America, different tribes
of Indians roving its plains looked upon other tribes with distrust
and hatred, and made war upon them. There was plenty of land; animal
life abounded; there was nothing in the aims and pursuits of one tribe
that was necessarily injurious to any other, yet apprehension and the
superstition of enmity kept them apart.
The world has not yet got rid of this old superstition. In this modern
Christian era there is scarcely a civilized nation which does not
keep itself in readiness to attack its neighbor. All the peace the
nations yet know is an armed peace, so that even when we cry, “Peace,
peace!” we know “there is no peace,” because man does not yet trust
his fellowman. He is fearful of him, not only as encroaching upon his
actual territory, but he resents his competition even in the making of
the tools and goods that civilized life demands.
We erect tariff walls, that the people of other countries may not
easily sell to us the goods they make, forgetting that, even without
those walls, they could not sell their goods to us, if we did not want
them. For, in free buying and selling, the desire must be mutual, else
there will be no exchange.
In all the relations of the most modern civilized society the effect of
this distrust, of one toward another, is plain to be seen. Even those
who devote their lives to preaching the doctrine of the gentle Nazarene
do not always grasp the full significance of that doctrine. The city
of Toledo, Ohio, is blessed with a mayor who has lost all distrust in
man (or perhaps he never learned it) and, in his efforts to administer
civic affairs on a basis of love and understanding, he is finding his
strongest opponents in some of the preachers of the community. Such is
the blinding effect of misunderstanding the unity of all life.
It cannot, therefore, be a matter of surprise to the student of
present-day affairs that his ancestors were slow to learn about other
groups what their still earlier ancestors had learned of individuals.
As the circle of man’s interests enlarged, including more and more
fellow-creatures, he began to come more and more into harmonious
relations with the Universe. Out of his personal experience he began
to perceive the mutual interests and the underlying oneness of human
life, and, through that perception, some have now begun to realize the
oneness of all life.
This is the road along which man must travel to reach harmony, and
harmony is rest. It is living in accord with the universal law which
regulates the growth and development of all things as well as their
activities. To the undeveloped savage the whole material universe, so
far as he could see it, was a jumble of inharmonious and unrelated
things—he saw no relation between the different bodies in the heavens
as they circled in their orbits; each created thing seemed to have its
separate existence, which had to be maintained without regard to any
other form of life. But science has shown us that the heavenly bodies,
however huge or remote, are all parts of one great system, under one
perfect law. We know now that, instead of the earth being the center of
the universe, round which all the stars, suns, moons, and other bodies
revolve, it is itself but a tiny unit in a tremendous system of systems.
All of these bodies have been circling in their orbits for untold
millions of years, unaffected by the fact that no man knew of them.
It is not too much to expect that they will continue to perform their
circlings according to those same laws even after science has taught us
all it is possible to discover. Man may profit from his knowledge of
universal laws, but he cannot alter them.
And yet the man of average intelligence even to-day feels that things
universal in relation to humanity and its needs are at “sixes and
sevens,” and that his anxiety and feverish activity are needed to alter
or better them. He still sees men as separate beings with interests
that clash.
It is this failure to understand that every life is bound up for good
with all other lives which leads us to worry about our “personal”
affairs, and thus to miss the rest that clear understanding would
bring.