a proof that I am evil, but rather as a
proof that God is showing me where happiness lies, and teaching me by
my mistakes to discern and value it. He could make me perfect if He
would, in a single instant. But the fact that He does not, is a sign
that He has something better in store for me than a mere mechanical
perfection.

V

THE USE OF FEAR

The advantages of the fearful temperament, if it is not a mere
unmanning and desolating dread, are not to be overlooked. Fear is the
shadow of the imaginative, the resourceful, the inventive temperament,
but it multiplies resource and invention a hundredfold. Everyone knows
the superstition which is deeply rooted in humanity, that a time of
exaltation and excitement and unusual success is held to be often the
prelude to some disaster, just as the sense of excitement and buoyant
health, when it is very consciously perceived, is thought to herald the
approach of illness. "I felt so happy," people say, "that I was sure
that some misfortune was going to befall me--it is not lucky to feel so
secure as that!" This represented itself to the Greeks as part of the
divine government of the world; they thought that the heedless and
self-confident man was beguiled by success into what they called ubris,
the insolence of prosperity; and that then atae, that is, disaster,
followed. They believed that the over-prosperous man incurred the envy
and jealousy of the gods. We see this in the old legend of Polycrates
of Samos, whose schemes all succeeded, and whose ventures all turned
out well. He consulted a soothsayer about his alarming prosperity, who
advised him to inflict some deliberate loss or sacrifice upon himself;
so Polycrates drew from his finger and flung into the sea a signet-ring
which he possessed, with a jewel of great rarity and beauty in it. Soon
afterwards a fish was caught by the royal fisherman, and was served up
at the king's table--there, inside the body of the fish, was the ring;
and when Polycrates saw that, he felt that the gods had restored him
his gift, and that his destruction was determined upon; which came
true, for he was caught by pirates at sea, and crucified upon a rocky
headland.

No nation, and least of all the Greeks, would have arrived at this
theory of life and fate, if they had not felt that it was supported by
actual instances. It was of the nature of an inference from the facts
of life; and the explanation undoubtedly is that men do get betra