them. They are all forms of unwillingness or resistance,
and may all be removed by dropping the resistance and yielding,--not to
the fear, but to a willingness that the fear should be there.

One of the small fears that often makes life seem unbearable is the
fear of a dentist. A woman who had suffered from this fear for a
lifetime, and who had been learning to drop resistances in other ways,
was once brought face to face with the necessity for going to the
dentist, and the old fear was at once aroused,--something like the
feeling one might have in preparing for the guillotine,--and she
suffered from it a day or two before she remembered her new principles.
Then, when the new ideas came back to her mind, she at once applied
them and said, "Yes, I _am afraid,_ I _am awfully afraid._ I am
_perfectly willing to be afraid,"_ and the ease with which the fear
disappeared was a surprise,--even to herself.

Another woman who was suffering intensely from fear as to the
after-effects of an operation, had begun to tremble with great nervous
intensity. The trembling itself frightened her, and when a friend told
her quietly to be willing to tremble, her quick, intelligence responded
at once. "Yes," she said, "I will, I will make myself tremble," and, by
not only being willing to tremble, but by making herself tremble, she
got quiet mental relief in a very short time, and the trembling
disappeared.

The fear of death is, with its derivatives, of course, the greatest of
all; and to remove our resistance to the idea of death, by being
perfectly willingly to die is to remove the foundation of all the
physical cowardice in life, and to open the way for the growth of a
courage which is strength and freedom itself. He who yields gladly to
the ordinary facts of life, will also yield gladly to the supreme fact
of physical death, for a brave and happy willingness is the
characteristic habit of his heart:--

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will."

There is a legend of the Arabs in which a man puts his head out of his
tent and says, "I will loose my camel and commit him to God," and a
neighbor who hears him says, in his turn, "I will tie my camel and
commit him to God." The true helpfulness from non-resistance does not
come from neglecting to take proper precautions against the objects of
fear, but from yielding with entire willingness to the n