Editorial October 9, 1978 Issue

Beating fears

Geoffrey J. Barratt

While a state of fear may often be quite easily identified, sometimes it is so latent or so deeply buried it may be undetected. Chronic indecisiveness, doubt, timidity, have the same roots as the more obvious deep anxiety. And they may be irritants that we've merely learned to live with rather than meet. Nothing that God causes—and He is the only cause—can bring about either dense worry or niggling timidity. In beating fears this is an essential spiritual fact to remember.

A thought-prodding definition of "fear" is found in the Glossary in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: "Heat; inflammation; anxiety; ignorance; error; desire; caution."^{Science and Health, p. 586;} Mary Baker Eddy gives us not a psychological analysis but a spiritual one. And it takes into account unexpected (to conventional human thought) manifestations of fear. Not one of the conditions listed can relate to the all-good God who made all, and whose omnipresence rules out fear as legitimate cause or effect. Man, God's manifestation, never knows fear. Affirming this, praying with this certainty, is the workable answer to fear.

God maintains His purity and substance throughout the universe moment by moment and always. Knowing this, we can meet and beat tension, stress, and apprehension. That we can do so is divine law, and divine law can never be infringed. This means that whatever you may be facing at this time or at any time, whatever makes you nervous and concerned, can be controlled and worked out spiritually.

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