Christ expressed His idea of courage very mildly when He said, in effect:  “Blessed are those who dare to be meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”

It takes a bolder front to step up to a man one knows is one’s enemy and cooeperate with him than it does to do a little, simple, thoughtless, outside thing like stepping up to him and knocking him down.

Cooeperating with a man in spite of him, moving over to where he is, winning a victory over him by getting at his most rooted, most protected, secret, instinctive feelings, literally striking him through to the heart and making a new kind of man out of him before his own eyes, by being a new kind of man to him, takes a bigger, stiller courage, is a more exposed and dangerous thing to do than to fall on him and fight him.

It is also more practical.  The one cool, practical, hard-headed way to win a victory over an enemy is to do the thing that makes him the most afraid.  And there is no man people are more afraid of than the man who stands up to them, quietly looks at them, and will not fight with them.  He is doing the one thing of all others to them that they would not dare to do.  They wonder what such a man thinks.  If he dares stand up before them and face them with nothing but thinking, what is he thinking?

What he thinks, if it makes him able to do a thing like this, must have some man-stuff in it.  They prefer to wait and see what he thinks.

Courage consists in not being afraid of one’s own mind and of other people’s minds.  When men become so afraid of one another’s minds and of their own minds that they cannot think, they have to back down and fight.  They are cowards.

They do not know what they think.

They do not know what they want.

CHAPTER XI

THE TECHNIQUE OF COURAGE

I have never known a coward.

I have known men who did cowardly things and who were capable of cowardly thoughts, but I have never known a man who could be fairly and finally classified as a coward.

Courage is a process.

If people are cowards it is because they are in a hurry.

They have not taken the pains to see what they think.

The man who has taken the time to think down through to what he really wants and to what he is bound to get, is always (and sometimes very suddenly and unexpectedly) a courageous man.

It is the man who is half wondering whether he really wants what he thinks he wants or not, or whether he can get it or not, who is a coward.

The coward is a half man.  He is slovenly minded about himself.  He gets out of the hard work of seeing through himself, of driving on through what he supposes he wants, to what he knows he wants.

So, after all, it is a long, slow, patient pull, being a courageous man.  Few men have the nerve to take the time to attend to it.