THE MIRACLES OF RIGHT THOUGHT by Orison Swett Marden

Author:Orison Swett Marden [Marden, Orison Swett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9788075839091
Publisher: Musaicum Press
Published: 2017-07-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter VIII.

The Paralysis of Fear

Table of Contents

Fear and worry make us attract the very things we dread.

The fear habit impairs health, shortens life and paralyzes efficiency.

Doubt and fear mean failure; faith is an optimist, fear a pessimist.

Fear in all its different phases of expression, such as worry, anxiety, anger, jealousy, timidity, is the greatest enemy of the human race. It has robbed man of more happiness and efficiency, has made more men cowards, more people failures or forced them into mediocrity, than anything else.

The effect which Halley’s Comet recently had upon the ignorant and superstitious people in all parts of the world was something appalling. Multitudes were completely prostrated and thousands made ill with terror; many became violently insane and scores committed suicide. A great many peasants in European countries were in momentary expectation that the comet would annihilate the earth, and in some towns messengers went through the streets blowing horns to awaken the people to the fact that the world was coming to an end.

The expectation that the earth would be burned up by the comet forced men to confess murder and other crimes of which they were not even suspected. Mothers poisoned their children. People ordered their coffins from undertakers in order to be ready for the terrible calamity. Several persons actually dropped dead at the first sight of the comet.

In the poorer sections of New York and other large cities great processions of people repeating their prayers paraded the streets with crucifixes in their hands, their terror-stricken faces turned toward the sky. Many were seen on their knees praying in the streets. There was great excitement among the negroes in the South, where all-night services were held in the churches, numbers professing salvation in an effort to prepare themselves for the fatal day when the earth would be destroyed by the comet’s tail. In numerous places the farms and fields were practically denuded of help, the hands positively refusing to work.

In Pennsylvania thousands of miners refused to go to their posts, while operations were entirely suspended in several mines. Similar instances could be multiplied by the thousands.

The comet gave an unusual opportunity for quacks to trade upon the superstitious fears of the ignorant. The officers of one of the ocean liners reported that a thriving business was being conducted in some of the West Indian Islands by selling “anti-comet” pills at a dollar a box. As these were very bitter they were supposed to be especially efficacious.

All this would not seem so strange in the Dark Ages when people were densely ignorant, but it certainly is lamentable in these progressive days that any large number of people, with all of the advantages of education and unlimited opportunities for enlightenment, should be so ignorant as to fear harm from a comet which has been visiting the earth periodically and harmlessly for untold centuries.

Despite all our boasts of education, environment, and freedom, and of the advantages which have come to us through many centuries of experience, vast multitudes

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.