The Great Redemption

( Originally Published 1922 )

I WAS born in fear, but that was not the beginning, for in fear my mother had conceived me, and during the period before my birth, often I felt her heart tremble with fear. But even that was not the beginning—oh, far from it. I feel within me the fear of remote generations, dim, shadowy, formless, vague; yet having the power to dominate and oppress me. Fearful inheritance, to have to struggle with terrors bequeathed by the dead! In dreams especially they assert their terrible sway over me, filling my brain with a phantasmagoria of horror, robbing my nights of peaceful rest, so that often the morning finds me weak, shattered, unrefreshed, and burdened with a nameless fear.

My parents worshipped the One True God, the God of Fear, and as a child I was always taken to church in order that my mind might receive indelible impressions of the faith which held them in terror. There was beauty in the church, in the many-hued windows with majestic aureoled figures, in the sacred statues with gold and jewelled crowns, in the marble altar with its hovering cloud of angels, and especially in the slow illumination thereof, candle by candle, until it became a solid blaze of light. I loved to see the young acolytes in their gowns, some of them as lovely as the marble seraphim; to watch the silent, marshalled order with which they attended an awe-inspiring figure clothed in gorgeous vestments; to hear at intervals their shrill, sweet young voices, rising above the deep note of the organ and responding to the priest in words which I understood not, but which I thought must be the language of Heaven; to smell the strange sweet odor of incense, and to see the communicants in white dresses leave the altar with bowed heads and clasped hands, looking like a company of the Shining Ones :—all this could not but mark a child's mind and soul with an abiding remembrance.

Alas, for me it was spoiled by the terrible sermons which the priest so often preached in those days, on Hell and the punishment of the Damned. There was one priest with a strong, rolling voice and an appearance of awful sincerity, who commonly chose this theme and whose words I shall never forget. How convincingly he simulated the anger of his terrible God! How movingly he depicted the pains and tortures of the Infernal Place! "Think, dear children," he would cry to us, "think but a moment on the pains of Hell. Mind cannot conceive it; tongue cannot utter it. If you touch the tip of your finger to a red-hot coal for but an instant, less than a second, what pain you suffer! Less than a second, mark you! Then think of this agony multiplied a thousand thousand times, and continued through all eternity, forever and ever! The pain never to be assuaged, and the punishment never to cease!"

It seemed to me, as I heard him, that Hell opened before my eyes, and I saw the very horrors he portrayed.

This priest was an honest man; he believed to the full extent what he told us; he was simply fulfilling a duty to his God of Fear. The cost of raising such awful images before childish minds, and filling childish hearts with such enduring terrors, was perhaps never considered by him; was no part of his priestly business. I should be glad to argue the point with him, could I now see him anywhere, save in my dreams.

But fear is not confined to what we call Religion or to the worship of a terrible Something in the sky; in one shape or another, it dogs life at every turn. No man, if he would confess the truth, ever lived a whole hour without fear. In order to maintain fear in the world, the human race has entered into a universal conspiracy which is ironically dubbed, "Civilization".

Government, taking pattern from Religion, is a thing of fear, with a soldier at the base and a king at the top ! Fear props every throne, writes every statute, and gives to every mummified injustice, the sanction of Law.

The world awaits its true Saviour—him who shall deliver it from fear. In our time, we shall not see him, but he is coming, oh yes, coming, sure as hope has lived along with fear during a myriad years.

Mankind has once been redeemed, we are taught, but alas! the fruits of that redemption are not for this world. Here the shadow and the oppression of fear have lifted but a very little for some races, and for others, not at all.

What a glorious hope, to bequeath to our children a world without fear?