Their fear extends to all who belong to them, for whom they conjure up scenes of deadly disaster so soon as they are out of sight. Their fancy is faceted, like the eyes of a fly, and they worry themselves and every one else by exaggerating every chance of danger into a certainty of destruction. When an epidemic is abroad, they are sure all the children will take it; and if they have taken it, they are sure they will never get over it. In illness indeed, those people who have allowed themselves to fall into the habit of fear are especially full of foreboding; not because they are more loving, more sympathetic than others, but because they are more timid and less hopeful. If you believe them, no one will recover who is in any way seriously attacked; and the smallest ailment in themselves or their friends is the sure forerunner of a mortal sickness. They make no allowance for the elastic power of human nature; and they dislike hope and courage in others, thinking you unfeeling in exact proportion to your cheerfulness. Morally this same habit of fear deteriorates, because it weakens and narrows, the whole nature. So far from following Luther's famous advice--Sin boldly and leave the rest to God--their sin is their very fear, their unconquerable distrust. These are the people who regard our affections as snares and all forms of pleasure as so many waymarks on the road to perdition--who would narrow the circle of human life to the smallest point both of feeling and action, because of the sin in which, according to them, the whole world is steeped. They see guilt everywhere, but innocence not at all. Their minds are set to the trick of terror; and fear of the power of the devil and the anger of God weighs on them like an iron chain from which there is no release. This is not so much from delicacy of conscience as from simple moral cowardice; for you seldom find these very timid people lofty-minded or capable of any great act of heroism. On the contrary, they are generally peevish and always selfish; self-consideration being the tap-root of their fears, though the cause is assigned to all sorts of pretty things, such as acute sensibilities, keen imagination, bad health, tender conscience, delicate nerves--to anything in fact but the real cause, a cowardly habit of fear produced by continual moral selfishness, by incessant thought of and regard for themselves.