With fear, anger also disappears; and anger in most cases is only fear in disguise. The angry are not courageous, they are afraid; you may nearly always count upon that with entire certainty. For example, the restless zealots and agitators who think their mission is to save Christianity from its death-bed through the might of their zeal and hate--such “wrathful saints” are but a kindred variety with those timid, sweetish people who are forever accommodating themselves to things, particularly to things that are grand and aristocratic; for the demeanor of both these classes springs from the one same source, their fear. But what most distresses men, often even those who are well advanced on the road of the Christian life, is the feeling of a constantly recurring weakness such as we know from the epistles of the bravest of all the apostles, and such as each one of us indeed knows from his own experience; with this almost universal singularity, that such spells of weakness are often wont to come on when quite unlooked for, and sometimes just after the best days of the inner life; and then they can bow down the soul to a genuine despair. As to this, the first thing to say, for the comfort of those thus bowed down, is that whatever is strong and powerful in the world always bears within it I know not what of rough and undivine. This we may ourselves observe in the case of men of exuberant force; involuntarily, we never have, concerning them, the feeling that they especially please God. Christianity, we may be sure, is in no way planned upon the model of such giants and demi-gods.