discomfort of others if
we could but secure our own ease, these are the thoughts which may
still have the power to torture us; and the hell that we may have to
fear may be the hell of conscious weakness and the horror of
retrospect, when we recollect how under these dark skies of earth we
went on our way claiming and taking all that we could get, and
disregarding love for fear of being taken advantage of. One of the
grievous fears of life is the fear of seeing ourselves as we really
are, in all our baseness and pettiness; yet that will assuredly be
shown us in no vindictive spirit, but that we may learn to rise and
soar.

There is no hope that death will work an immediate moral change in us;
it may set us free from some sensual and material temptations, but the
innermost motives will indeed survive, that instinct which makes us
again and again pursue what we know to be false and unsatisfying.

The more that we shrink from self-knowledge, the more excuses that we
make for ourselves, the more that we tend to attribute our failures to
our circumstances and to the action of others, the more reason we have
to fear the revelation of death. And the only way to face that is to
keep our minds open to any light, to nurture and encourage the wish to
be different, to pray hour by hour that at any cost we may be taught
the truth; it is useless to search for happy illusions, to look for
short cuts, to hope vaguely that strength and virtue will burst out
like a fountain beside our path. We have a long and toilsome way to
travel, and we can by no device abbreviate it; but when we suffer and
grieve, we are walking more swiftly to our goal; and the hours we spend
in fear, in sending the mind in weariness along the desolate track, are
merely wasted, for we can alter nothing so. We use life best when we
live it eagerly, exulting in its fulness and its significance, casting
ourselves into strong relations with others, drinking in beauty, making
high music in our hearts. There is an abundance of awe in the
experiences through which we pass, awe at the greatness of the vision,
at the vastness of the design, as it embraces and enfolds our weakness.
But we are inside it all, an integral and indestructible part of it;
and the shadow of fear falls when we doubt this, when we dread being
overlooked or disregarded. No such thing can happen to us; our
inheritance is absolute and certain, and it is fear that keeps us away
from it, and the fear of