Yet when we consider how the want of courage
interferes with our powers of usefulness, we cannot doubt that
conscience should have force to make brave men and women of us all. In
the various relations of life there is nothing that so paralyzes the
powers as fear. They who are the subjects of fear are slaves, let their
position or their endowments be what they may. The want of courage in
practical life brings failure, casualty, and even death, in its train:
intellectually, it robs us of half our power; morally, it puts us in
bondage to our fellow-beings; and religiously, it leaves us without
hope.
Hope and fear are alike children of the Imagination; but how different
is their aspect! Fear walks through the world with abject gait,
searching constantly after something of which it may be afraid; for,
like all the other faculties, it perpetually demands food, and if it
finds it not in the world around, imagines it in the world within. Few
persons, perhaps none, are fearful in every department of life; but
almost every one is so in some particular relations. Just so far as we
succumb to fear, we lose the control of our powers, and lie at the feet
of circumstance instead of cooperating with it, and making it subserve
our benefit. Hope, on the contrary, finds cause for joy everywhere, and
when surrounded by gloom sees, in imagination, the dawn that must come
even after the blackest night, and is buoyed up by the remembrance,
that, though "sorrow may endure for a night, joy cometh in the morning.
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