ix.] PHYSICAL AND SPIRITUAL FEAR. 20? 



law of guidance : and yet his intellect, left unguided, 

 may "be rapid and acute enough to lead him into terrible 

 follies. Infinitely more imaginative than the lowest 

 animals, he is for that very reason capable of being 

 infinitely more foolish, more cowardly, more super- 

 stitious. He can what the lower animals, happily for 

 them, cannot organise his folly ; erect his superstitions 

 into a science ; and create a whole mythology out of his 

 blind fear of the unknown. And when he has done 

 that Woe to the weak ! For when he has reduced his 

 superstition to a science, then he will reduce his cruelty 

 to a science likewise, and write books like the " Malleus 

 Maleficarum," and the rest of the witch literature of the 

 fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; of 

 which Mr. Lecky has of late told the world so much, 

 and told it most faithfully and most fairly. 



But, fear of the unknown ? Is not that fear of the 

 nnseen world ? And is not that fear of the spiritual 

 world ? Pardon me : a great deal of that fear all of 

 it, indeed, which is superstition is simply not fear 

 of the spiritual, but of the material ; and of nothing 

 else. 



The spiritual world I beg you to fix this in your 

 minds is not merely an invisible world which may 

 become visible, but an invisible world which is by its 

 essence invisible ; a moral world, a world of right and 

 wrong. And spiritual fear which is one of the noblest 

 of all affections, as bodily fear is one of the basest is, 

 if properly defined, nothing less or more than the fear 

 of doing wrong ; of becoming a worse man. 



But what has that to do withniere fear of the unseen? 

 The fancy which conceives the fear is physical, not 

 spiritual. Think for yourselves. What difference is 



