The risks people are prepared to take these days are certainly a different set from what they used to be... Dickens describes a journey into the Scottish Highlands:
When we got safely to the opposite bank, there came riding up a wild highlander, his great plaid streaming in the wind, screeching in Gaelic to the post-boy on the opposite bank, making the most frantic gestures....
The boy, horses and carriage were plunging in the water, which left only the horses' heads and boy's body visible.... The man was perfectly frantic with pantomime.... The carriage went round and round like a great stone, the boy was pale as death, the horses were struggling and plashing and snorting like sea animals, and we were all roaring to the driver to throw himself off and let them and the coach go to the devil, when suddenly it all came right (having got into shallow water) and, all tumbling and dripping and jogging from side to side, they climbed up to the dry land.
....
I'm for civilization. I'm all for certain kinds of progress and I accept quite gladly most of today's means of avoiding the risks that Dickens and Kipling and all of mankind before them had to run, but to imagine that we shall whip off the dishonesty that is characteristic of fallen human nature everywhere as painlessly as we whip off one garment and put on another, to imagine that by simply taking a different view we shall come up with a no-risk brand of honesty, is a piece of self-deception and fatuity to make the mind reel.
Plato, three hundred years before Christ, predicted that if ever the truly good man were to appear, the man who would tell the truth, he would have his eyes gouged out and in the end be crucified.
That risk was once taken, in its fullest measure. The man appeared. He told the world the truth about itself and even made the preposterous claim "I am the Truth." As Plato foresaw, that man was crucified.
He calls us still to follow him, and the conditions are the same: "Let a man deny himself and take up his cross."
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Elisabeth Elliot, "On Asking God Why"
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