Inner World

    "A chronic hatred or even a cherished grudge tears to pieces the one who harbors it.  A strong feeling of resentment is just as likely to cause disease as is a germ.  The worst thing one can do to oneself is to let resentment dig in and for hatred to become chronic.  … Fear is another indispensable element in the human make-up. Even in its simpler form we cannot dispense with it; on the streets of a modern city a fearless man, if the phrase be taken literally, would probably be dead before nightfall. And fear can be a powerfully creative motive. In a profound sense industry springs from fear of penury, medical science from fear of disease. But fear's abnormalities - hysteria, obsessive anxiety -  may tear a personality to pieces.

   Human life is full of secret fears, thrust into the dark corners of the personality.  Fear of the dark, of cats, of closed places, of open places, fear of responsibility, of having children, of old age and death; guilty fears, often concerned with sins long passed religious fears, associated with ideas of a vindictive God and an eternal hell; and sometimes a vague fearfulness, filling life with anxious apprehension - such a wretchedness curses innumerable lives. The disruptive effect of such secret, chronic fearfulness is physically based.  The adrenal glands furnish us in every frightening situation with a 'swig of our own internal fight-tonic.'  A little of it is stimulating; too much of it is poison.  Habitual anxiety and dread constitute a continuous false alarm, turning the invaluable adrenal secretion from an emergency stimulant into a chronic poison."   -  H. E. Fosdick

Please Read: "The Gettysburg Address"

  "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

   Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war.  We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

    But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate-we can not consecrate-we can not hallow-this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.  It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced.  It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us-that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion-that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain-that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth."
  - Abraham Lincoln, November 19, 1863.