Page:The stuff of manhood (1917).djvu/92

 men live in constant terror of the spirits that haunt the air or the world, and where a large element of their worship is shaped by that dominant principle of their religion, the dread of the unseen and the unexperienced. Even among us is there not a great deal, both of religious orthodoxy and of religious heresy, that is only the child of fear? There is a coercion of sound doctrine and there is a coercion of false doctrine, and a great many men and women belong to their school of religious opinion simply because they are afraid to break away from the companionship in which they have always been or to disagree with the associations which condition them.

Much religious conduct, too, springs only from the fear of one's environment. One of the saddest things which one meets in going out across the world is the great multitude, especially of young men, who, when they have left Christian lands and the environment and support of Christian surroundings, have simply collapsed in all their religious conviction and character. Asia is strewn from one end of it to the other with the wrecks of men who, while they were at home, supposedly were men of religious character and conviction, but who showed when they went away from home that it was not a matter of their own real selves at all. It was just a matter of their timid servility and acceptance of the condi