What should concern us about fear is not its seeming origin but how it is to be removed. Believing in the reality of what appears to cause our fears, and then having faith that somehow and in some way the danger will pass away, is not faith at all. It is mere human wishful thinking, devoid of spiritual power. Faith, to be faith in the only true sense of the word, must be based on the all-power of God.

Once when Christ Jesus and his disciples put out to sea in a small boat, they were overtaken by a violent storm. Fearing that they must all perish, the disciples awoke their Master, who had been asleep. And when he had rebuked the wind and stilled the raging of the waters, he asked (Luke 8:25), "Where is your faith?"

Yes, where was their faith? Where is our faith? Are we, like the disciples, preoccupied in thinking of the insecurity of the things of the so-called material world? Any faith the disciples had in the stanchness of their craft or in their skill as seamen appears to have availed them nothing. Perhaps they even reminded themselves that more than once before they had come through the horror of raging waters and hurricane winds safely. But this, too, apparently availed little. Thus we see that faith must be faith in God, good, and not in matter or in material circumstances. Our faith must be based, as Jesus' faith was, on the spiritual understanding that divine Love is the only reality and power.

Mary Baker Eddy makes frequent references to faith as an instrumentality in the release of spiritual power. Indeed, at the very outset of her textbook, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," she writes (p. 1), "The prayer that reforms the sinner and heals the sick is an absolute faith that all things are possible to God, —a spiritual understanding of Him, an unselfed love." A careful scrutiny of the punctuation in this sentence brings to light the fact that the faith requisite in the healing and saving power of God also entails "a spiritual understanding of Him" and "an unselfed love." Without these two basic factors underlying absolute spiritual faith, faith would not be truly faith but merely blind belief.

Spiritual understanding reveals God as infinite divine Spirit, or Mind, the creator of man and the universe. All that God creates, therefore, is wholly spiritual and mental. As God's perfect and immortal image and likeness, the real spiritual man is eternally one with and inseparable from God. Created, governed, and sustained by God, good, man exists forever at the standpoint of complete harmony and security.

Unselfed love, the other vital factor in the exercise and demonstration of a practical spiritual faith, is something more than human unselfishness. It is that love of God which is evident when thought is turned away from material things and from a human sense of self and remains focused on the recognition that God, divine Love, is truly All-in-all. It includes spiritual discernment of the ever-presence of an all-loving God eternally caring for His own.

How completely Christ Jesus held to an absolute and unconditional faith that all things were possible to God! He declared, speaking of the possibility of salvation for all (Matt. 19:26), "With men this is impossible; but with God all things are possible." His life and works gave full proof that his faith was in God as the Father of all and in the real man's irrefrangible unity with his creator. To his disciples, and to all the world, he showed over and over again what the power of a perfect faith could do to remove human fear. And he did this not by making men ignore the seeming danger, but by making them turn from it to God. Then they could see the danger as a false appearance and as unreal, because through the spiritual sense that faith in God engenders they were enabled to see in some measure the spiritual reality in place of the material seeming.

Fear is always about something material—a fear of ill-health in a so-called material body, of lack of material supply, of destructive material forces, and so on. True faith, on the other hand, has to do with spiritual and eternal things, with the substance of Spirit. It is based on the operation of divine law as ever present to meet every human need. Fear is always an illusion of material sense, or a misconception of what is spiritually real and actual. It makes no difference whether we fear what we see or see what we fear, for material sense testimony has absolutely no validity, regardless of how substantial it appears. Material sense can cognize only that which is false.

Faith in the fact that spiritual good is all there really is brings thought consciously in line with the law of divine Love. And this law of divine Love is ceaselessly operating to dispel the illusions of material sense, including fear. It does this by unfolding through spiritual sense what is actually and divinely going on exactly where the opposite activity seems to be. Nothing opposes spiritual wholeness.

Plainly, the thoughts we harbor, whether of faith or fear, determine the nature of what appears as our outward human experience for good or for evil. Hence the force of Mrs. Eddy's words (Science and Health, p. 261), "Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionably to their occupancy of your thoughts." Surely, this rule of Christian Science can be found adequate to remove fear, for there is never anything to fear in "the enduring, the good, and the true." There is always faith in the exercise of these divine qualities, for faith is concerned with that only which is of God, infinite and ever-present good.