Fear is the greatest enemy of mankind. It is the creator of evil, for many people sin through fear. It is the maker of cowards and moral weaklings, the foe of all progress, the barrier to advancement, physical, mental, spiritual. He who is afraid dares not, and he who dares not, knows not, feels not, enjoys not. The fearful do not live; they merely exist, in bondage to a terror that leaves them neither night nor day. They know few of the delights of achievement, for they are afraid to dare. Fear throttles endeavor, stifles hope, murders aspiration. It is a hydra-headed monster of protean forms. It is a liar and a coward, a beguiler and a thief, a sneak and a poltroon, a slanderer and a cur. It comes in a thousand guises--sometimes as caution, then as tact, again as consideration for others, but ever and always as a deceiver and a destroyer. If there is one thing above another that I wish I had learned in earliest youth, and I wish I had known enough to teach my children in their earliest days, it is perfect fearlessness. The only thing I fear to-day is fear. To go through life afraid of this and that and the other, is to take away all joy, all spontaneity, all freedom, all aspiration, all endeavor. I used to believe and teach that we should "fear God." But the word "fear" as here used is not the abject, groveling, contemptible feeling that so many people imagine it to be. God has made us in His own image. He wishes us to stand upright, and greet Him as filial beings should, proud and glad to come to Him as "Our Father." Fear makes us whine and whimper before God, and go to Him in the same spirit of dread that leads the Indian to feel he must always be propitiating the powers that be. If he does not pray and sing and dance and smoke the good powers will be offended, and will injure him, and the evil powers will be made more evil and do him more harm than they otherwise would. Hence month in and month out, because of fear, he seeks by his dances, and smokings, and songs, and prayers to protect himself from evil by soothing their possible anger and quieting their fury against him. There is much of this same spirit in our old-time theology, and our present-day life. We are afraid of God. God doesn't want us to be afraid. Every man should therefore stand upright, afraid of neither God, man, nor devil. God is no tyrant to be turned from His purposes by sycophantic worship, or by "much speaking" and importunity. He is a reasonable God, a loving God, a just God, a merciful God, and abject fear will never change His plans as to His treatment of any human being. As to being afraid of men, why should one man ever be afraid of another? Let us stand upright as men--one man just as good as another--_if he is as good_, and if he isn't as good, knowing that all the potentialities of godhead are within his own soul. We are gods, says Browning, though but as yet in the germ. Let us fearlessly develop the germ, or give it opportunity for development.