Article December 10, 1904 Issue

The Illusion of Fear

ALICE M. SWARTHOUT.

A little child whose father bought him a toy dog seemed to be filled with great fear when it was brought near him. He drew back, trembling and screaming. At first he would not be persuaded that his fears were groundless, but loving words and the knowing that there was nothing to fear soon banished the tears and trembling, and the little hand reached out to take the dreaded toy. Had the toy dog changed in appearance? No. What, then, had been changed? The child's sense of fear was destroyed by the truth about the plaything.

This little incident brought to my thought the groundlessness of human fears. How the dreaded monsters of mortal sense are as harmless as the little toy dog when divested of their false disguise by Truth, and I was led to compare the child's experience with my own in teaching school. My first experience found me at the head of a large country school where order seemed to be an unknown quantity. It was my problem to solve the equation and bring out the unknown quantity. As in the case of the child, mortal mind invested the school with many grotesque and fearful qualities, among other things, an undercurrent of rebellion that might bring failure to me as it had to former teachers. Sometimes these evil suggestions seemed very real, very vivid, but a constant denial of their reality, their supposed power, the knowing that they were no part of God's creation,—this annihilated their claims, and, as in Moses' time, "The serpent, evil, under wisdom's bidding, was destroyed through understanding in Science, and this proof was a staff upon which to lean" (Science and Health, p.321).

I was then led to inquire what had been the battleground. Had the boys, the school, or the teacher been changed? No. Outwardly there were the same boys, the same school, the same teacher, but mortal mind had been seeing God's ideas through a distorted sense, just as had the child with his toy. It had invested God's creation with qualities which He never intended, then feared its own mind pictures. The battleground was therefore in this same mind; all the fear, the dread and the trembling were here in mortal belief. In reality these fears had never existed as anything or anybody, and when the serpent, error, was handled, when mortal sense was divested of its fears, the visible manifestation was order. I had found the unknown quantity, and had learned that, "To fear sin is to misunderstand the power of Love, and the divine Science of being in man's relation to God,—to doubt His government, and distrust His omnipotent care" (Science and Health, p.231).

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