through this timidity and indolence, or through an imaginativeness
which could see in a great opportunity nothing but a sea of troubles,
which would, I do not doubt, have melted away as one advanced. But no
one has suffered except myself! Institutions do not depend upon
individuals; and I regard such failures now just as the petulant
casting away of a chance of experience, as a lesson which I would not
learn; but there is nothing irreparable about it; one only comes, more
slowly and painfully, to the same goal at last. I dare not say that I
regret it all, for we are all of us, whether small or great, being
taught a mighty truth, whether we wish it or know it; and all that we
can do to hasten it is to put our will into the right scale. I do not
think mistakes and failures ought to trouble one much; at all events
there is no fear mingled with them. But I do not here claim to have
attained any real serenity--my own heart is too impatient, too fond of
pleasure for that!--yet I can see clearly enough that it is there, if I
could but grasp it; and I know well enough how it is to be attained, by
being content to wait, and by realising at every instant and moment of
life that, in spite of my tremors and indolences, my sharp impatiences,
my petulant disgusts, something very real and great is being shown me,
which I shall at last, however dimly, perceive; and that even so the
goal of the journey is far beyond any horizon that I can conceive, and
built up like the celestial city out of unutterable brightness and
clearness, upon a foundation of peace and joy.
It is very difficult to determine, by any exercise of the intellect or
imagination, what fears would remain to us if we were freed from the
dominion of the body. All material fears and anxieties would come to an
end; we should no longer have any poverty to dread, or any of the
limitations or circumscriptions which the lack of the means of life
inflicts upon us; we should have no ambitions left, because the
ambitions which centre on influence--that is, upon the desire to direct
and control the interests of a nation or a group of individuals--have
no meaning apart from the material framework of civil life. The only
kind of influence which would survive would be the influence of
emotion, the direct appeal which one who lives a higher and more
beautiful life can make to all unsatisfied souls, who would fain find
the way to a greater serenity of mood. Even upon earth we can see a
faint foreshadowing of this in the fact that the only personalities who
continue to hold the devotion and admiration of humanity are the
idealists. Men and women do not make pilgrimages to the graves and
houses of eminent jurists and bankers, political economists or
statisticians: these have done their work, and have had their reward.
Even the monuments of statesmen and conquerors have little power to
touch the imagination, unless some love for humanity, some desire to
uplift and benefit the race, have entered into their schemes and
policies. No, it is rather the soil which covers the bones of dreamers
and visionaries that is sacred yet, prophets and poets, artists and
musicians, those who have seen through life to beauty, and have lived
and suffered that they might inspire and tranquillise human hearts. The
princes of the earth, popes and emperors, lie in pompous sepulchres,
and the thoughts of those who regard them, as they stand in metal or
marble, dwell most on the vanity of earthly glory. But at the tombs of
men like Vergil and Dante, of Shakespeare and Michelangelo, the human
heart still trembles into tears, and hates the death that parts soul
from soul. So that if, like Dante, we could enter the shadow-land, and
hold converse with the spirits of the dead, we should seek out to
consort with, not those who have subdued and wasted the earth, or have
terrified men into obedience and service, but those whose hearts were
touched by dreams of impossible beauty, and who have taught us to be
kind and compassionate and tender-hearted, to love God and our
neighbour, and to detect, however faintly, the hope of peace and joy
which binds us all together.
And thus if emotion, by which I mean the power of loving, is the one
thing which survives, the fears which may remain will be concerned with
all the thoughts which cloud love, the anger and suspicion that divide
us; so that perhaps the only fears which will survive at all will be
the fears of our own selfishness and coldness, that inner hardness
which has kept us from the love of God and isolated us from our
neighbour. The pride which kept us from admitting that we were wrong,
the jealousy that made us hate those who won the love we could not win,
the baseness which made us indifferent to the discomfort of others if
we could but secure our own ease, these are the thoughts which may
still have the power to torture us; and the hell that we may have to
fear may be the hell of conscious weakness and the horror of
retrospect, when we recollect how under these dark skies of earth we
went on our way claiming and taking all that we could get, and
disregarding love for fear of being taken advantage of. One of the
grievous fears of life is the fear of seeing ourselves as we really
are, in all our baseness and pettiness; yet that will assuredly be
shown us in no vindictive spirit, but that we may learn to rise and
soar.
There is no hope that death will work an immediate moral change in us;
it may set us free from some sensual and material temptations, but the
innermost motives will indeed survive, that instinct which makes us
again and again pursue what we know to be false and unsatisfying.
The more that we shrink from self-knowledge, the more excuses that we
make for ourselves, the more that we tend to attribute our failures to
our circumstances and to the action of others, the more reason we have
to fear the revelation of death. And the only way to face that is to
keep our minds open to any light, to nurture and encourage the wish to
be different, to pray hour by hour that at any cost we may be taught
the truth; it is useless to search for happy illusions, to look for
short cuts, to hope vaguely that strength and virtue will burst out
like a fountain beside our path. We have a long and toilsome way to
travel, and we can by no device abbreviate it; but when we suffer and
grieve, we are walking more swiftly to our goal; and the hours we spend
in fear, in sending the mind in weariness along the desolate track, are
merely wasted, for we can alter nothing so. We use life best when we
live it eagerly, exulting in its fulness and its significance, casting
ourselves into strong relations with others, drinking in beauty, making
high music in our hearts. There is an abundance of awe in the
experiences through which we pass, awe at the greatness of the vision,
at the vastness of the design, as it embraces and enfolds our weakness.
But we are inside it all, an integral and indestructible part of it;
and the shadow of fear falls when we doubt this, when we dread being
overlooked or disregarded. No such thing can happen to us; our
inheritance is absolute and certain, and it is fear that keeps us away
from it, and the fear of fearlessness. For we are contending not with
God, but with the fear which hides Him from our shrinking eyes; and our
prayer should be the undaunted prayer of Moses in the clefts of the
mountain, "I beseech Thee, show me Thy Glory!"
THE END
End of Project Gutenberg's Where No Fear Was, by Arthur Christopher Benson