Every advanced thinker, whose life and action spell progress for the race, has to be a daring pioneer. He must be an iconoclast; he must be self-contained, self-assured, self-confident. He must stand aloof from his fellows in the very spirit of the message he brings, for he dares—imperfect, weak, even sinful though he be—to be a teacher, a leader of others. And how natural, human, it is for those who live with or near him, seeing and knowing as they do, all his foibles, weaknesses, littlenesses, failures, sins, to magnify these things and by them hide the beauty and grandeur of the lesson God has given him to teach the world.
Our poets have given us some wonderfully vivid pictures of the fearless. Perhaps the greatest in all literature is Shelley's Prometheus. It is worth reading a score of times in order that its spirit of fearlessness might be absorbed. Joaquin Miller's Columbus, which I have already quoted, gives a marvelously vivid picture of the great admiral when even hope had gone from his own heart, when he could not pierce by faith the darkness of his own soul.
Then, pale and worn, he kept his deck,
And peered through darkness. Ah, that night
Of all dark nights!
Yet though it was all darkness to his own soul, and in his own soul, he kept on. His orders were "Sail on!" And his courage and bravery brought him to the light of the new world.
Browning in his Prospice opens with the bold and daring interrogative: "Fear death?" and, after showing what there is to fear, exclaims as in an ecstasy of fearlessness:
I would hate that death bandaged my eyes, and forebore
And bade me creep past.
No! let me fare like my peers, the heroes of old.