DELIVERANCE FROM FE AR AND C ARE

of childhood, and modem men are delivered from some of the ancient dreads. To state the fact in this way is to state the cause of the deliverance. The fearsome fancies of the nursery were the offspring of ignorance and inexpérience ; the ancient terrors were the créations of superstition and of false views of the world; they vanish when the man enters into the wider life of reason, knowledge, and expérience, like the nightshadows which vanish with the coming of day. Many men, carried away at the moment by great enthusiasms, hâve no fear of death ; others hâve been delivered from this fear by a broader view of life wherein death finds a healthful and lifeward function.

Similarly, we are delivered from many cares according as our life takes on a larger sweep and a grander manner, just as a man who walks by the Sun or by the stars is not so anxious conceming the détails of his way as is he who needs a local sign at every tuming. Precisely in the same fashion, many are delivered from things which in youth-time are hannful, bruising, threatening, evil, by the mère fact of the natural ascent of the life into the control of the higher centres, the quickening of wider interests, the fixing of the life-centre outside the narrow boundaries of the Little Self, the " stupid old body," the " wandering lunatic mind."

Clearly, so far as reaUzed in particulars, deliverance is always in some form or other the

2«0 THE PERPECT DELIVERANCE

entrance into a wider life. It is this fact wMch Carpenter pushes to its logical conclusion. For of the ddiverances to which référence has been xnade, some are incomplète, and some are temporary; it is scarcely possible to destroy the whole brood of Fear and of Care piecemeal ; we escape the superstitions fears of paganism only to fall victims to the church-made fears of Christianity; we leave one family of cares smitten by the roadside, only to find their more formidable cousins waiting for us round the next corner. Besides this, when ail the particular fears and cares and evils that flesh is heir to hâve been enumerated, there remains over and above them in the very structure of ordinary human natinre the capacity for Fear, for Anxiety, and for being tempted of evil. The final and perfect deliverance is to be lifted above even this capacity, to transcend it. This capacity for Fear and for Anxiety roots in our self-consciousness. Fear may be one expression of the instinct of selfpréservation ; it is so in animais ; and the Self which we fear to lose is the outward Self and its appendages. Instructed only by gui self-consciousness we imagine this to be the real self; but to see that it is not our real self, that the true Self indeed thrives by the continuai death of the outer self, and that the true Self, being the Universal particularized in the individual, is indestructible, is to perceive the possibiUty of rédemption from ail fear; actually to realize