Fear of Death thus dies in senseless sleep.
Beaumont.

Primitive man feared thunder, and, being unable to explain it, made a god of it, offered sacrifices to it in the hope of averting the harm it might do. Fear has perverted many religions. What man feared he first crouched before in helpless terror, and afterwards knelt before in wonder and worship. In the early days of the race he looked upon every new or strange thing with terror, because he did not understand its connection with the things he knew.

Man first knew himself as a physical creature with certain needs and cravings that must be gratified if he were to live at all. He did not at first realize that the presence of another person would make life easier and more secure for him; rather, he feared that every other would injure him. Later, as men formed themselves into groups, clans and tribes, each recognized the interests of the immediate group as of supreme importance, but feared the other groups. This was the origin of “Honor thy father and thy mother, that thy days may be long in the land.” Those families that obeyed their natural leader, the patriarch, held together and survived; the others were separated and destroyed. The early records of the Jews are scarcely more than a chronicle of the wars of a coherent race against various other tribes inhabiting that part of Asia, together with the lessons to be drawn from its experience. Even in the vast new continent of America, different tribes of Indians roving its plains looked upon other tribes with distrust and hatred, and made war upon them. There was plenty of land; animal life abounded; there was nothing in the aims and pursuits of one tribe that was necessarily injurious to any other, yet apprehension and the superstition of enmity kept them apart.

The world has not yet got rid of this old superstition. In this modern Christian era there is scarcely a civilized nation which does not keep itself in readiness to attack its neighbor. All the peace the nations yet know is an armed peace, so that even when we cry, “Peace, peace!” we know “there is no peace,” because man does not yet trust his fellowman. He is fearful of him, not only as encroaching upon his actual territory, but he resents his competition even in the making of the tools and goods that civilized life demands.

We erect tariff walls, that the people of other countries may not easily sell to us the goods they make, forgetting that, even without those walls, they could not sell their goods to us, if we did not want them. For, in free buying and selling, the desire must be mutual, else there will be no exchange.

In all the relations of the most modern civilized society the effect of this distrust, of one toward another, is plain to be seen. Even those who devote their lives to preaching the doctrine of the gentle Nazarene do not always grasp the full significance of that doctrine. The city of Toledo, Ohio, is blessed with a mayor who has lost all distrust in man (or perhaps he never learned it) and, in his efforts to administer civic affairs on a basis of love and understanding, he is finding his strongest opponents in some of the preachers of the community. Such is the blinding effect of misunderstanding the unity of all life.

It cannot, therefore, be a matter of surprise to the student of present-day affairs that his ancestors were slow to learn about other groups what their still earlier ancestors had learned of individuals. As the circle of man’s interests enlarged, including more and more fellow-creatures, he began to come more and more into harmonious relations with the Universe. Out of his personal experience he began to perceive the mutual interests and the underlying oneness of human life, and, through that perception, some have now begun to realize the oneness of all life.

This is the road along which man must travel to reach harmony, and harmony is rest. It is living in accord with the universal law which regulates the growth and development of all things as well as their activities. To the undeveloped savage the whole material universe, so far as he could see it, was a jumble of inharmonious and unrelated things—he saw no relation between the different bodies in the heavens as they circled in their orbits; each created thing seemed to have its separate existence, which had to be maintained without regard to any other form of life. But science has shown us that the heavenly bodies, however huge or remote, are all parts of one great system, under one perfect law. We know now that, instead of the earth being the center of the universe, round which all the stars, suns, moons, and other bodies revolve, it is itself but a tiny unit in a tremendous system of systems.

All of these bodies have been circling in their orbits for untold millions of years, unaffected by the fact that no man knew of them. It is not too much to expect that they will continue to perform their circlings according to those same laws even after science has taught us all it is possible to discover. Man may profit from his knowledge of universal laws, but he cannot alter them.

And yet the man of average intelligence even to-day feels that things universal in relation to humanity and its needs are at “sixes and sevens,” and that his anxiety and feverish activity are needed to alter or better them. He still sees men as separate beings with interests that clash.

It is this failure to understand that every life is bound up for good with all other lives which leads us to worry about our “personal” affairs, and thus to miss the rest that clear understanding would bring.