FEAR appears as an assertion of being in opposition to the one great universal essence, divine Love. The Scriptural statements are therefore significant: God is Love. Whosoever dwelleth in Love dwelleth in God and God in Him. Perfect love casteth out fear. Whosoever feareth is not made perfect in love.
Fear is the world's greatest slave-holder. Monarchs and peasants, learned and unlearned, the old and the young, the civilized and the savage, all in greater or less degree yield temporary obedience to the arbitrary dictates of this most cruel of cruel task-masters. A mouse may stampede a whole herd of elephants. The greatest conquests of human history have not been the much heralded victories of nation over nation, army over army, or of man over the forces of nature. Such triumphs may be and have been great, but there is yet a greater conquest. This conquest is the victory gained over fear in the individual consciousness of every human being. The processes of man's awakening in the divine image and likeness of God seem to be from beginning to end a succession of victories over fear, in both the abstract and in the concrete. Fear is both the tempter and the tempted, the torment and the tormenter. Fear is the world's torture-chamber to which the race, through erroneous belief, commits itself. Individual effort, moral courage, and mental ascension into oneness with the divine nature, reverse this sentence and destroy the element of human nature which would lead every individual into this place of torment.
Fear is parent to such mentally debilitating moods as apprehension, worry, timidity, cowardice, depression, superstition, self-deprecation, self-limitation, and that merely animal or fool-hardy false courage, which under stress will hazard the most unnecessary risks. Fear of suffering and of the discipline consequent upon the infraction of moral and spiritual law often begets dishonesty of thought and action. Hence fear is frequently the parent of dishonesty. Fear is little less than atheism. It is a mood, belief, or sense of things which practically denies the ever-presence of God as all Truth, Life, and Love. Fear is a component part of the Adamic or animal nature; a re-actionary state of thought which is at all times delusion. Fear is the prolific cause of day-ghosts, and of the nightmares of darkness. It has been well said that "fear is the devil's ablest representative agent, the child most resembling the features of its parent." Fear is the intimate and congenial accomplice of evil in the majority of the great tragedies of human experience.
