Conquest of fear

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.

In their most poignant hours of terror, men have often instinctively felt that God is their only possible deliverer. They have prayed in a blind way that God might interpose and save, through some miraculous power, from evils that are real. Blind faith in the best concept they have of God may have many times relieved them of their fears by exchanging these for a confidence which approaches more nearly to the truth, but it leaves the latent fear ready to spring forth again at some fresh assault of danger. This is not the scientific overcoming of fear as illustrated in the Scriptural records and demonstrated by Christian Science.

Fear cannot be definitely eradicated while it is believed that evil is a reality and has power. Fear is vanquished when it is understood that God is All, and that there is nothing which is able to dispute His power. Every object of fear upon earth is simply the manifestation of some belief held in the carnal mind which is itself the essence of fear. When it is seen that the carnal mind which fears is unreal, because it is no part of God’s creation, its objects of terror can no longer terrify, because they, too, are then exposed as falsities. Mrs. Eddy writes on page 454 of Science and Health, “The understanding, even in a degree, of the divine All-power destroys fear, and plants the feet in the true path—the path which leads to the house built without hands ‘eternal in the heavens.’” Conquest of all fear is not achieved without much effort. It must result from the experience of numerous victories over the little daily fears; over timidity self-distrust, worry, anxiety, moral cowardice. Spiritual fearlessness and courage is developed in just the ratio that consciousness unfolds in the understanding and reflection of divine Love.

The instinctive desire for flight, which accompanies fear, never opens a true escape from danger, as Moses learned when he fled from before the serpent. When he went back to take up the serpent, and it became a rod in his hand,—the rod he had cast down,—he learned that his fear, and indeed all fear, was due to an illusive belief in evil as power. The understanding of the allness of God, which destroyed his fear of evil, was the power that enabled him later to say to the children of Israel when they were fleeing before Pharaoh, “Fear ye not, stand still, and see the salvation of the Lord which he will shew to you to day,” and to stretch his rod over the waters of the Red Sea. The spiritual courage that can “stand still” and realize the omnipotence of God and the powerlessness of all that is unlike Him, is inevitably directed in the way of deliverance both from bodily danger and from the temptation to sin. Even though that way may lead through the sea of human difficulties, nothing will be destroyed in the passage but the belief in evil.

When the disciples were terrified by danger upon the sea, Christ Jesus said to them, “Why are ye fearful, O ye of little faith?” and he arose and stilled the storm. Again, when he walked to them upon the waters, through boisterous wind, he reassured them with the words, “Be of good cheer; it is I; be not afraid,” and when he came with the rescued Peter into the ship, “the wind ceased.” When the report came from the ruler of the synagogue’s house that the little daughter was dead, Jesus said to the father, “Be not afraid, only believe,” and the child was restored. It is evident that these words, if they had been uttered from the same level of belief where the disciples stood, would have had no power over peril of storm or death. The power behind the words lay in a knowledge of God which the disciples had not yet attained, but which is possible for all to achieve, as Christ Jesus himself taught and made abundantly clear for all time. Jesus the Christ was fearless because he perfectly understood that God was not the creator of evil. He proved the nothingness of every material danger and disease because he abode in the truth and therefore understood that, as Mrs. Eddy says on page 377 of Science and Health, “the cause of all so-called disease is mental, a mortal fear, a mistaken belief or conviction of the necessity and power of ill-health; also a fear that Mind is helpless to defend the life of man and incompetent to control it. Without this ignorant human belief, any circumstance is of itself powerless to produce suffering.”

Where God, divine Principle, is, there can be no fear, for divine Principle contains no element of destruction. A knowledge of this fact destroys any consciousness of danger. So it is the abiding realization that God is truly omnipresent and is Love that enables the human being in any condition whatsoever to prove that there is no cause to be “afraid for the terror by night,” as the psalmist declared, “nor for the arrow that flieth by day; nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.”