COURAGE AND THE FEAR OF HEATH.

Patea Mail, Volume II, Issue 114, 13 May 1876, Page 3

COURAGE AND THE FEAR OF HEATH.

( ♦ The Spectator noticing an article on this subject by Mr Lionel Tullcmache, says ; It is nearly certain that the courage usually called physical, the daring which defies personal danger, or finds in it a pleasurable slimnlns, courage like that of General Picton, or Lord Gough—who grow gayer, and bettor tempered, and more intellectual under the bullets —has very little relation indeed to indifference to death Entire races which arc not brave tare nothing about death. The Chinese of the southern deltas, whohavc little active Courage, though I lie Chinese of the north and west have" plenty, will die for a bribe to save a richer criminal from the sentence he has earned. The Bengalee, who alone among mankind says calmly, 1 Anne hhoroo,’ ‘I am timid,’ as if cowardice were Inatter of moral and social indifference, or rather creditable than otherwise, goes to execution, as Macaulay noticed, like a hero, and will encounter an inevitable and agumising death without a flutter of the pulse. Ilia nerve is as great as WainWright’s, who died without a perceptible change in'the steadiness of his heart-boats, but who—unlike the Bengalee—with an object before him would probably have rushed upon the cannon. The Malay, who cannot ho induced or compelled to face rockets, dies as tranquilly as Casahinnca ; and the Cingalese of the coast, who will fight nobody, meets death _ without a murmur or a pang. An English sailor of the old typo, who would face anything except a black cat, has probably twice as much fear of death as the cultivated woman win can endure death by a deadly operation designedly, : yet faint in the presence of any noisy danger. . . . Certain creeds ought, if moral fear is the root of the fear of .-’death, to create that fear, but in spite of Mr Tollomaehc’s obvious wish to decide that way* he does not venture to do it. Calvinists die as quietly as Universal ists, and Catholics, even when, according to their creed, they have much to dread, as tranquilly ns either. Charles 11., who by bis subjects’ creed bad earned boll, and by bis own must have expected purgatory, if only for letting Titus Oates murder . men for believing as Charles did himself, died with the calm urbanity of Joseph Addison, The preachers say Atheists die dreadful deaths, which, if true, shows that the dread of the after-life is not the origin of the terror of death; but as a matter of fact, they die like _ other people—and sometimes very easily, like Mirabcan. Christianity ought to produce in the majority, who never can think that they have acted up to its precepts, an acute awe of death, but we do not flud that they die less creditably than their Pagan forefathers. The Norsemen who died singing did not face death more coolly than the soldiery on the ‘ Birkenhead,’ of whom most must have held the popular creed, and have known that it threatened them.”