Article November 1, 2013

Conquest of fear

Originally published in the January 30, 1918 issue of The Christian Science Monitor

Fear is the world’s greatest enslaver. It is an emotion excited by an assertion of a power opposed to God. It is an element of every disease, and death is but its apex. All the passions of the carnal mind, the envy, deceit, ambition, which are the essence of unrighteous war, are allied with fear. The battle grounds of history have recorded the clash of different phases of fear, and the fiercest struggles of individual consciousness are those in which some form of fear is the principal opposer. The real victor which emerges from the individual or the collective conflicts of the human mind, is the man or the nation that has conquered fear through faith in the power of right.

From the beginning to the end of the Scriptures, the admonition, “Fear not,” is insistent. In the great individual and national crises, the first indication of divine aid usually appeared in the injunction against fear. It is clear from this that there must be a deep underlying reason for the importance attached to the destruction of fear. This reason is found in John’s declaration that “God is love,” and in his further explanation that “there is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear.” Fear is a denial of Love, and it suffers from its own belief that there can be reality in aught that is unlike God. In proportion, then, that consciousness rises into unity with divine Love, a man is freed from his fears; and as fear is cast out, those dangers which had seemed so real, one by one melt away into nothingness. Perils of every nature are thus seen to be coexistent with fear; and the destruction of fear is the destruction of the effect of fear.

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