Notwithstanding the words of Jesus of Nazareth, by which one-half of the world's inhabitants are supposed to be governed; notwithstanding the admonitions of the other great teachers to whom the other half of humanity turn for counsel; notwithstanding the lessons taught by all of nature's processes of growth, especially the teachings of later evolution; fear--fear of death, fear of disaster, fear of non-attainment, fear of non-preferment, and fear of the things that never happen as feared, and the anger and the worry growing out of these fears--have been looked upon as afflictions necessary to humanity, repressible only during life, and eradicable only at the change called death. Early theology wrestled with conditions wherein it was thought necessary to use the whip of fear as well as the attraction of love to incline men to religion. Modern theology teaches the religion of love alone, but it has not yet sufficiently denounced the former teaching of fears, perhaps in the interest of consistency or because of filial respect, inasmuch as its parents once put the label of _truth_ upon the religion of fear. Science also has taught, and still continues to teach, the potency of the _crowding-out_ stimulant in growth, without proclaiming a line where attraction became the stronger motive in civilization--an intangible line already far astern in the wake of present progress. Fear has had its uses in the evolutionary process, and seems to constitute the whole of forethought, as instinct seems to constitute the whole of intelligence in most animals, but that it should remain any part of the mental equipment of human civilized life is an absurdity. There are, undoubtedly, human beings that are still so nearly animal that fear alone will restrain them from wrong-doing, or stimulate them (or, rather, _push_ them) to peaceful and useful living, but none such will read this book, and neither you nor I should be burdened by their limitations or necessities. We have passed the point where we need to be _pushed_; or, if we have not, we are ashamed to confess it, thereby acknowledging that it is unnecessary; and are within the atmosphere of appreciation and attraction where fear and its expressions have no proper place, and where the toleration of fear beclouds not only our own clear vision, but also the vision of those who are still below us in the scale of intelligence, to whom, as beacon-lighters on the heights above them, we owe the influence of right example.