What is there in God to fear? Is the Lord of life also the foe of our lives? Is the author of a world so fair and lovely, inviting us to joy and inspiring with feelings of pleasure, the foe of happiness? Has He made the world a paradise and planted in man's breast the seeds of kindness, gentleness and sweet thoughts only to glower over His world in hatred and to damn it with dread of Himself?
All things that can be known argue the goodness of the unknown. As soon as a man learns to live with nature he loses his fear of forest, beast, and sea. Familiarity breeds confidence, affection and reverence. Only the remote and unfamiliar fill us with dread. The city bred tremble in the woods at night, where the native feels himself amongst well loved friends.
In the same manner the fear of the divine, born of unfamiliarity, instead of being an evidence of reverence or of religion, becomes the mark of ignorance and cowardice. Rectitude of conduct, resulting wholly from regulating oneself as under an all-seeing critical eye and in dread of a far-reaching devastating hand, cannot produce enrichment of character. Hatred never gave birth to holiness.
The souls that in all ages have lived nearest to things spiritual, that have most enriched the world with thoughts, whose inner visions pierced our outer clouds, seeing something of the glory of the infinite, brought back no pictures of a face austere, of a cruel despot, or of aught for love or truth to fear.
True faith instead of being a compromise to allay our fears of unknown ills and calamities, ever has been the fearless, reverent search for the face of the infinite. It does not say: "I believe that God will let me alone because I did those prescribed things"; rather it says: "I cannot be satisfied alone and apart from Him, the source and sole satisfaction of all life."
Science with its passion for truth, art with its passion for beauty, ethics with its passion for rightness, are all but parts of true religion, the soul's passion for the infinite heart and mind in which all ideas of truth and beauty take their rise and find their full realization.
The soul of man never has ceased to cry out for the living God; the religion of fear has given it no satisfaction. Its followers have been too busy building themselves shelters from the heaven they dread, shelters that become as leaden shields shutting out the eternal tenderness and beneficence. No man ever found the celestial city or its glorious king so long as he regarded his religion as a cyclone cellar.
To those who, with eyes of reverence, seek to find the good in all things here, believing that love is better and mightier than hate, that whatever is good, kindly, tender, pure, and ennobling in us, is but the reflection from the glory of the infinite, traces in our dust by which we find our way to Him who inhabits eternity, these, through eyes of faith, have found a presence beyond description or definition.
Fear sets afar off a mighty monarch; faith finds near at hand one whom it calls "Father." Fear shrinks from the impending wrath, love rests in the unchanging goodness. Fear imagines a throne and flaming sword; faith has confidence in a better day ever dawning, in the triumph at last of right, in the reality of an incomprehensible love that sings in its joy, soothes in its sorrow, strengthens in its discipline, a life and love nearer and more real than any of the other facts of living.