“Held that hope was all a lie And faith a form of bigotry And love a snare that caught him. Then thought to comfort human tears With sundry ill-considered sneers At things his mother taught him.” And he had thought he was doing it because he was courageous, whereas the real motive was that of fear. He was a coward, without courage enough to fly his own flag unflinchingly, to be and do the thing which in his heart, in the very fibres of his being, flesh of his mother’s flesh, he knew was the thing he should be and do. And if we would really look into our lives we should discover that fear plays a far larger part with us than we ever dreamed. Men and women lie. Why? Simply because they are afraid of telling the truth and taking the consequences. Nine out of every ten falsehoods――perhaps ninety-nine out of every hundred――are the spawn of fear. And the same thing is true of sin, and of no small measure of unbelief, as well as of no small measure of pretended belief. Our great need is the discovering of something that will cast fear out of our lives, that will enable us to walk unafraid in the open sunlight of His pathway Who bade men to be afraid of nothing. Think how greatly we need this emancipation from fear in the simple matter of loyalty to principle. There is so much of expediency and compromise and adaptation among us, so great reluctance to ruffle the smooth conventionalities of life, whereas what the world needs is men and women who can see right principle as principle, unconfused and undistorted, and then who, unafraid, will abide in that right principle. How greatly, too, this is needed in the plain, commonplace matter of duty-doing! All around us much simple work waits to be done by men and women who, first of all, can see it, and then have the courage to do it. The obscure tasks that, after all, are the really great and worthy ones, how few there are to do them! There is a fine passage in Morley’s essay on Rousseau in which he describes what real history is, and how much we make of history that really is not history at all, but simply the spectacular doings of men who for the time being were deemed great and who usually were engaged in war, whereas the great bulk of life was not the life of warfare at all. It was the life of peace,――of the quiet agricultural people, of the tradespeople, of the homes, which is not written up in any history at all,――that was the real history of the world. The men and the women who were doing earth’s work were not those who went out to battle or on great expeditions, but those who, day by day, heroically, unflinchingly, and without fear of oblivion, did the real business of the world. There are some familiar lines of Lowell’s in “Under the Old Elm” that put the principle for us: