And thus if emotion, by which I mean the power of loving, is the
one thing which survives, the fears which may remain will be
concerned with all the thoughts which cloud love, the anger and
suspicion that divide us; so that perhaps the only fears which will
survive at all will be the fears of our own selfishness and
coldness, that inner hardness which has kept us from the love of
God and isolated us from our neighbour. The pride which kept us
from admitting that we were wrong, the jealousy that made us hate
those who won the love we could not win, the baseness which made us
indifferent to the 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.
Pages:
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224