THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LOS ANGELES IN MEMORY OF EDWIN CORLE PRESENTED BY JEAN CORLE ■I- A ' f\ / ^ +^ /C}$Z r> ■ztn j i . THE CONQUEST OF FEAR BASIL KING THE CONQUEST OF FEAR %ueS GARDEN CITY PUBLISHING CO., INC. GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK c COPYRIGHT, 1921, BY DOUBLEDAY, PAGE j & COMPANY. ALL EIGHTS RESERVED. PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES AT THE COUNTRY LIFE PRESS, GARDEN CITY, N. Y. College Library CONTENTS CHAPTER *AGE I. Fear and the Life-Principle . . >; . i II. The Life-Principle and God .... 31 III. God and His Self-Expression . . . . 62 IV. God's Self-Expression and the Mind of To-day 84 V. The Mind of To-day and the World as It Is . 130 VI. The World as It Is and the False God of Fear 182 VII. The False God of Fear and the Fear of Death 217 VIII. The Fear of Death and Abundance of Life 262 5f 4 1164048 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR THE CONQUEST OF FEAR CHAPTER I FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE HEN I say that during most of my conscious life I have been a prey to fears I take it for granted that I am expressing the case of the majority of people. I cannot remember the time when a dread of one kind or another was not in the air. In child- hood it was the fear of going to bed, of that mysterious time when regular life was still going on downstairs, while I was buried alive under sheets and blankets. Later it was the fear of school, the first contact of the tender little soul with life's crudeness. Later still there was the 2 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR experience which all of us know of waking in the morning with a feeling of dismay at what we have to do on getting up ; the obvious duties in which perhaps we have grown stale; the things we have neglected; those in which we have made mistakes; those as to which we have wilfully done wrong; those which weary or bore or annoy or discourage us. Sometimes there are more serious things still: bereavements, or frightfully adverse conditions, or hardships we never expected brought on us by someone else. It is unnecessary to catalogue these situations, since we all at times in our lives have to face them daily. Fear dogs one of us in one way and another in another, but everyone in some way. Look at the people you run up against in the course of a few hours. Everyone is living or working in fear. The mother is afraid for her children. The father is afraid for his business. The clerk is afraid for his job. The worker is afraid of his boss or his competitor. There is hardly a man who is not afraid that some other man will do him a bad turn. There is hardly FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE 3 a woman who is not afraid that things she craves may be denied her, or that what she loves may be snatched away. There is not a home or an office or a factory or a school or a church in which some hang-dog apprehension is not eat- ing at the hearts of the men, women, and chil- dren who go in and out. I am ready to guess that all the miseries wrought by sin and sickness put together would not equal those we bring on ourselves by the means which perhaps we do least to counteract. We are not sick all the time; we are not sinning all the time; but all the time all of us — or practically all of us — are afraid of someone or something. If, therefore, one has the feeblest contribution to make to the defeat of such a foe it becomes difficult to with- hold it. II But even with a view to conquering fear I should not presume to offer to others ideas worked out purely for myself had I not been so invited. I do not affirm that I have conquered 4 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR fear, but only that in self-defence I have been obliged to do something in that direction. I take it for granted that what goes in that direc- tion will go all the way if pursued with perse* verance and good will. Having thus made some simple experiments — chiefly mental — with what to me are effective results, I can hardly re- fuse to tell what they have been when others are so good as to ask me. And in making this attempt I must write from my own experience. No other method would be worth while. The mere exposition of a thesis would have little or no value. It is a case in which nothing can be helpful to others which has not been demonstrated for oneself, even though the demonstration be but partial. In writing from my own experience I must ask the reader's pardon if I seem egoistic or au- tobiographical. Without taking oneself too smugly or too seriously one finds it the only way of reproducing the thing that has happened in one's own life and which one actually knows. And when I speak above of ideas worked out FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE $ purely for myself I do not, of course, mean that these ideas are original with me. All I have done has been to put ideas through the mill of my own mind, co-ordinating them to suit my own needs. The ideas themselves come from many sources. Some of these sources are so 'deep in the past that I could no longer trace them; some are so recent that I know the day and hour when they revealed themselves, like brooks in the way. It would be possible to say to the reader, "I owe this to such and such a teaching, and that to such and such a man," only that references of the kind would be tedious. I fall back on what Emerson says : "Thought is the property of him who can entertain it; and of him who can adequately place it. A certain awkwardness marks the use of borrowed thoughts ; but, as soon as we have learned what to do with them, they become our own. Thus all originality is relative." The thoughts that I shall express are my own to the extent that I have lived them — or tried to live them — though 6 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR the wind that bloweth where it listeth may have brought them to my mind. Nor do I think for a moment that what I have found helpful to me must of necessity be help- ful to everyone. It may be helpful to someone. That is the limit of my hope. It is simple fact that no one can greatly help anyone else. The utmost we can do is to throw out an idea here and there which another may seize, and by which he may help himself. Borrowed help has the awkwardness which Emerson attributes to borrowed thoughts. It is only when a concept has lain for a time in a man's being, germinated there, and sprung into active life, that it is of much use to him ; but by that time it has become his own. The kingdom of heaven must begin within oneself or we shall probably not find it anywhere. These pages will contain, then, no recipe for the conquest of fear; they will offer, with much misgiving and diffidence, no more than the rec- ord of what one individual has done toward conquering it. This record is presented merely FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE 7 for what it is worth. It may be worth nothing. On the other hand, someone may find it worth something, and in that case all that the writer hopes for will be attained. Ill As a matter of fact, in my own case the reac- tion against fear was from the beginning more or less instinctive. With the first exercise of the reasoning faculty I tried to argue against the emotion. I remember that as a little boy I was afraid of a certain dog that barked at me when I went to a certain house to which I was sent perhaps two or three times a week. The house had a driveway, and from the minute of pass- ing the entrance my knees trembled under me. But even then, I recall, it seemed to me that this terror was an incongruous thing in life, that it had no rightful place there, and that, if the world was what my elders told me it was, there must be in it a law of peace and harmony which as yet I hadn't arrived at. I cannot say that when the dog barked this reasoning did more 8 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR than nerve me to drag my quaking limbs up to the doorstep, whence my enemy, a Skye terrier, invariably took flight. During a somewhat stormy childhood and boyhood, in which there was a good deal of emo- tional stress, I never got beyond this point. Spe- cific troubles were not few, and by the time I reached early manhood a habit of looking for them had been established. "What's it going to be now?" became a formula of anticipation be- fore every new event. New events presented themselves most frequently as menaces. Hopes rarely loomed up without accompanying proba- bilities of disappointment. One adopted the plan of "expecting disappointment" as a means of cheating the "jinx." I am not painting my early life as any darker than most lives. It was, I fancy, as bright as the average life of youth. IV But, contrary to what is generally held, I ven- ture to think that youth is not a specially happy FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE 9 period. Because young people rarely voice their troubles we are likely to think them serene and unafraid. That has not been my experience either with them or of them. While it is true that cares of a certain type increase with age the knowledge of how to deal with them increases, or ought to increase, in the same progression. With no practical experience to support them the young are up against the unknown and problematical — occupation, marriage, sexual urge, life in general — around which clings that terror of the dark which frightened them in childhood. Home training, school training, college training, religious training, social influ- ences of every kind, throw the emphasis on dan- gers rather than on securities, so that the young life emerges into a haunted world. Some are reckless of these dangers, some grow hardened to them, some enjoy the tussle with them, some turn their minds away from them, while others, chiefly the imaginative or the intellectual shrink from them with the discomfort which, as io THE CONQUEST OF FEAR years go on, becomes worry, anxiety, forebod- ing, or any other of the many forms of care. My own life followed what I assume to be the usual course, though in saying this I am anxious not to give an exaggerated impression. It was the usual course, not an unusual one. "There's always something" came to be a com- mon mental phrase, and the something was, as a rule, not cheering. Neither, as a rule, was it terrible. It was just something — a sense of the carking hanging over life, and now and then turning to a real mischance or a heartache. It strikes me as strange, on looking back, that so little attempt was made to combat fear by religion. In fact, as far as I know, little at- tempt was made to combat fear in any way. One's attention was not called to it otherwise than as a wholly inevitable state. You were born subject to fear as you were born subject to death, and that was an end of it. FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE n Brought up in an atmosphere in which reli- gion was our main preoccupation, I cannot re- call ever hearing it appealed to as a counter- agent to this most persistent enemy of man. In dealing with your daily dreads you simply counted God out. Either He had nothing to do with them or He brought them upon you. In any case His intervention on your behalf was not supposed to be in this world, and to look for rewards from Him here and now was consid- ered a form of impiety. You were to be willing to serve God for naught; after which unexpected favours might be accorded you, but you were to hope for nothing as a right. I do not say that this is what I was taught; it was what I under- stood ; but to the best of my memory it was the general understanding round about me. In my fight against fear, in as far as I made one, God was for many years of no help to me, or of no help of which I was aware. I shall return to the point later in telling how I came to "dis- cover God" for myself, but not quite the same God, or not quite the same concept of God. 12 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR which my youthful mind had supposed to be the only one. VI At the same time it was to a small detail in my religious training — or to be more exact in the explanation of the Bible given me as a boy — that I harked back when it became plain to me that either I must conquer fear or fear must conquer me. Having fallen into my mind like a seed, it lay for well on to thirty years with no sign of germination, till that "need," of which I shall have more to say presently, called it into life. Let me state in a few words how the need made itself pressing. It was, as life goes, a tolerably dark hour. I was on the borderland between young manhood and early middle age. For some years I had been losing my sight, on top of which came one of those troubles with the thyroid gland which medical science still finds obscure. For reasons which I need not go into I was spending an au* FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE 13 tumn at Versailles in France, unoccupied and alone. If you know Versailles you know that it com- bines all that civilisation has to offer of beauty, magnificence, and mournfulness. A day's visit from Paris will give you an inkling of this, but only an inkling. To get it all you must live there, to be interpenetrated by its glory of decay. It is always the autumn of the spirit at Ver- sailles, even in summer, even in spring; but in the autumn of the year the autumnal emotion of the soul is poignant beyond expression. Sad gardens stretch into sad parks; sad parks into storied and haunting forests. Long avenues lead to forgotten chateaux mellowing into ruin. Ghostly white statues astonish you far in the depths of woods where the wild things are now the most frequent visitors. A Temple of Love — pillared, Corinthian, lovely — lost in a glade to which lovers have probably not come in a hundred years — will remind you that there were once happy people where now the friendliest sound is that of the wood-chopper's axe or the i 4 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR horn of some far-away hunt. All the old tales of passion, ambition, feud, hatred, violence, lust, and intrigue are softened here to an aching sense of pity. At night you will hear the castle clock, which is said never once to have failed to strike the hour since Louis the Fourteenth put it in its place, tolling away your life as it has tolled away epochs. Amid these surroundings a man ill, lonely, threatened with blindness, can easily feel what I may call the spiritual challenge of the ages. He must either be strong and rule; or he must be weak and go down. He must get the domin- ion over circumstance, or circumstance must get the dominion over him. To be merely knocked about by fate and submit to it, even in the case of seemingly inevitable physical infirmity, be- gan to strike me as unworthy of a man. It is one thing, however, to feel the impulse to get up and do something, and another to see what you can get up and do. For a time the spectre of fear had me in its power. The physi- cal facts couldn't be denied, and beyond the FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE 15 physical facts I could discern nothing. It was conceivable that one might react against a men- tal condition; but to react against a mysterious malady coupled with possibly approaching blindness was hardly to be thought of. When one added one's incapacity to work and earn a living, with all that that implies, it seemed as if it would take the faith that moves mountains to throw off the weight oppressing me. It is true that to move mountains you only need faith as a grain of mustard seed, but as far as one can judge not many of us have that much. It was then that my mind went back all of a sudden to the kernel planted so many years be- fore, in my island home, in the Gulf of St. Law- rence. If I become prolix over this it is only that I want to show how often it happens to parents, teachers, and others who deal with chil- dren, to throw out a thought which after lying dormant for years will become a factor in the life. Had it not been for the few words spoken then I should not, as far as I can see, now have such mastery over self as I have since attained 16 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR — not very much — but I should not be writing these lines. VII My boyhood was placed in the times when Darwin's "Origin of Species" and "Descent of Man" had thrown the scientific and religious worlds into convulsion. The struggle between the old ideas and the new calls for no more than a reference here ; but the teacher to whom I owe most was one who, while valuing the old, saw only an enrichment in the new, explaining the Bible in that spirit. So it happened that he spoke one day of the extraordinary ingenuity of the life-principle, which somehow came to the earth, in adapting itself to perpetually new con- ditions. Nothing defeated it. For millions of years it was threatened by climatic changes, by the lack of food, by the ferocity of fellow-creatures. Heat, cold, flood, drought, earthquake, and vol- canic eruption were forever against it. Strug- gling from stage to stage upward from the sljme FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE 17 a new danger was always to it a new incentive to finding a new resource. Pursued through the water it sought the land. Pursued on the land it sought the air. Pur- sued in the air it developed fleetness of wing, and in fleetness of wing a capacity for soaring, circling, balancing, dipping, and swinging on itself of which the grace must not blind us to the marvellous power of invention. In other words, the impulses leading to the origin of species proclaim a resourcefulness on. the part of what we call life which we have every reason to think inexhaustible. Whatever the Fount of Being from which the life-princi- ple first came into the waters of our earth there is no question but that with it came a conquest- principle as well. Had it been possible to ex- terminate the life-principle it would never have gone further than the age which saw the extinc- tion of the great reptiles. The great reptiles went, but the life-principle stayed on, with the ability to assume, within our limited observa- tion, all the forms between the bacillus and the i8 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR elephant, while as to what lies beyond our ob- servation the possibilities are infinite. Long before it works up to man we see tnis amazing force stemming an uncountable num- ber of attacks, and meeting ruinous conditions with daring contrivances. For one kind of danger it develops a shell, for another a sting, for another a poison, for another a protective colouration. To breathe in the sea it puts forth gills, and makes lungs for itself when stranded on the land. In glacial cold it finds the means of growing fur; when heat and cold assail it by turns it packs itself with feathers; when climate* become temperate it produces hair. Foi the creature which keeps to the water it webs the foot; for that which takes to the trees it makes the toes prehensile; for the one which learns to stand erect and run along the ground it flattens the sole, making it steady and supporting. To resist, to survive, to win through, is the end to which the life-principle sets itself with such sin- gleness of aim as to unfold a wealth of poten« tiality astounding to us in looking backward. FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE 19 VIII This was the idea which came back to me that autumn at Versailles, and from which in the course of time I drew my conclusions. Briefly, those conclusions were to the effect that as individuals we need difficulties to over- come, and that fear is a stimulus to overcoming them. Otherwise expressed, fear loses much of its f earf ulness when we see it as the summons to putting forth new energies. Unless we were conscious of the energies such a call would not reach us. The creatures preceding man could have felt no misgiving, since they lacked the imagination essential to a dread. Such fear as they were equal to must have seized them in paroxysms of terror when calamities threatened to overwhelm them. If they made good their escape no trace of the fear remained behind, the brain having little or no power of retention. We may take it for granted that the pterodactyl and the trachodon had none of the foreboding 20 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR based on experience which destroys the peace of man. Fear, as we understand it, was in itself a sig- nal of advance. It could only have begun with the exercise of reason. Arrived at the rudi- ments of memory the creature must have been able to perceive, however dimly, that the thing which had happened might happen again. Adding the first stirrings of imagination he must have constructed possible events in which the danger would come from the same causes as be- fore. With the faculties to remember, to rea- son, and to imagine all at work we reach the first stages of man. Man was born into fear in that he was born into a world of which most of the energies were set against him. He was a lone thing fighting his own battle. The instinct for association which made the mammals different from other animals didn't help him much, since association did not bring mutual help as a matter of course, and never has done so. A man could count on no one but himself. Not only were prodigipui FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE 2f natural forces always menacing him with de- struction ; not only was the beast his enemy and he the enemy of the beast; but his hand was against his fellow-man and his fellow-man's hand against him. This mutual hostility fol- lowed men in their first groupings into com- munities, and only to a degree have we lived it down in the twentieth century. Perhaps this conviction that a man's strength lay in standing single-handed against circum- stance was the first small discovery I made in my own fight with fear. Looking back on the developments which had brought man into the world I saw a marvellous power of getting round difficulties when you couldn't cut through them. Just as a river which cannot flow over a rock can glide about its feet and turn it into a picturesque promontory, so I recognised in myself an inborn human faculty for "sidestep- ping" that which blocked my way, when 1 couldn't break it down. I left Versailles with just that much to the good — a perception that the ages had bequeathed 22 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR me a store of abilities which I was allowing to lie latent. Moving into Paris, to more cheer- ful surroundings, I took up again the writing of the book I had abandoned more than a year previously. After long seclusion I began to see a few people, finding them responsive and wel- coming. My object in stating these unimpor- tant details is merely to show that in proportion as I ceased to show fear the life-principle has- tened to my aid. Little by little I came to the belief that the world about me was a system of co-operative friendliness, and that it was my part to use it in that way. IX To use it in that way was not easy. I was so accustomed to the thought of Nature as a com- plex of self-seeking cruelties, the strong prey- ing on the weak, and the weak defenceless, that the mere idea of its containing a ruling co-op- erative principle seemed at times far-fetched. To the common opinion of the day, my own in- FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE 23 eluded, the conception of a universe that would come to a man's aid the minute a man came to his own was too much like a fairy tale. It may indeed be a fairy tale. All I know is that in my own case it is the way in which it seems to have worked. I think I have caught a glimpse of a constructive use for that which I had pre- viously thought of as only destructive and ter- rible. This is what I mean. The life-principle having, through unknown millions of years, de- veloped the conquest-principle by meeting dif- ficulties and overcoming them, the difficulties had a value. To man, especially, the menace of Nature, the ferocity of the beast, and the enmity of his fellow-man furnished the incentive to his upward climb. Had all been easy he would have stayed where he was. He would never have called mental powers to his physical aid, nor appealed to spiritual faculties when the mental fell short of his requirements. Spurred on by a necessity which grew more urgent in proportion as the life-principle widened its 24 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR scope, the conquest-principle became an impulse which would brook no denying. Man grew by it; but the fact remains that he would not have grown had there been nothing for him to strug- gle with. To me it seems basic to the getting rid of fear to know that our trials, of whatever nature, are not motiveless. In our present stage of devel- opment we could hardly do without them. So often looking like mere ugly excrescences on life they are in reality the branches by which we catch on and climb. They are not obstacles to happiness for the reason that the only satisfying happiness we are equal to as yet is that of wrestling with the difficult and overcoming it. Every call of duty has its place in this ideal, every irksome job, every wearisome responsi- bility. The fact that we are not always aware of it in no way annuls the other fact that it is so. Boredom, monotony, drudgery, bereavement, loneliness, all the clamour of unsatisfied ambi- tions and aching sensibilities, have their share in this divine yearning of the spirit to grasp what FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE 2$ as yet is beyond its reach. All of that hacking of the man to fit the job rather than the shaping of the job to fit the man, which is, I imagine, the source of most of the discontent on earth, has its place here, as well as the hundreds of things we shouldn't do if we were not compelled to. Whatever summons us to conflict summons us to life, and life, as we learn from a glance at the past, never shirks the challenge. It never shirks the challenge, and, what is more, it never fails to find the expedient by which the new demand is to be satisfied. To the conquest of fear that plank must be foundational. As far as we can learn there never was an emer- gency yet which the life-principle was not equipped to meet. When all existing methods had been used up it invented new ones; when seemingly at the end of its new resources it was only beginning to go on again. X The deduction I make is this, that a law which was operative on such a scale before man had 26 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR come into the world at all must be still more ef- fective now that we can help to carry it out. The life-principle is not less ingenious than it ever was, while the conquest-principle must have widely expanded. It is an axiom in all progress that the more we conquer the more easily we conquer. We form a habit of conquering as in- sistent as any other habit. Victory becomes, to some degree, a state of mind. Knowing our- selves superior to the anxieties, troubles, and worries which obsess us, we are superior. It is a question of attitude in confronting them. It is more mental than it is material. To be in harmony with the life-principle and the con- quest-principle is to be in harmony with power; and to be in harmony with power is to be strong as a matter of course. The individual is thus at liberty to say : "The force which never failed before is not likely to fail in my case. The fertility of resource which circumvented every kind of obstacle to make me what I am — a vertebrate, breathing, walking, thinking entity, capable of some creative expres- FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE 27 sion of my own — will probably not fall short now that I have immediate use for it. Of what I get from the past, prehistoric and historic, per- haps the most subtle distillation is the fact that so far is the life-principle from balking at need, need is essential to its activity. Where there is no need it seems to be quiescent; where there is something to be met, contended with, and over- come, it is furiously 'on the job.' That life- principle is my principle. It is the seed from which I spring. It is my blood, my breath, my brain. I cannot cut myself off from it; it can- not cut itself off from me. Having formed the mastodon to meet one set of needs and the but- terfly to meet another, it will form something to meet mine, even if something altogether new. The new — or what seems new to me — is appar- ently the medium in which it is most at home. It repeats itself never — not in two rosebuds, not in two snowflakes. Who am I that I should he overlooked by it, or miss being made the ex- pression of its infinite energies?" 28 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR XI What this reasoning did for me from the start was to give me a new attitude toward the multi- fold activity we call life. I saw it as containing a principle that would work with me if I could work with it. My working with it was the main point, since it was working with me always. Ex- actly what that principle was I could not at the time have said; I merely recognised it as being there. The method of working with it was simple in idea, however difficult in practice. It was a question of my own orientation. I had to get mentally into harmony with the people and con- ditions I found about me. I was not to distrust them ; still less was I to run away from them. I was to make a parable of my childish experience with the Skye terrier, assuming that life was organised to do me good. I remembered how many times the Bible begins some bit of plead- ing or injunction with the words, "Fear not." FEAR AND THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE 29 Other similar appeals came back to me. "Say to them that are of a fearful heart, Be strong! fear not."* "Quit yourselves like men; be strong." f "O man greatly beloved, fear notl Peace be unto thee! Be strong, yea, be strong!" J When, at some occasional test, dis- may or self-pity took hold of me I formed a habit of saying to myself, in our expressive American idiom: "This is your special stunt. It's up to you to do this thing just as if you had all the facilities. Go at it boldly, and you'll find unexpected forces closing round you and coming to your aid." Which is just what I did find. To an amaz- ing degree people were friendly, while condi- tions became easier. Fear diminished because I had fewer things to be afraid of. Having fewer things to be afraid of my mind was clearer for work. Work becoming not only more of a resource but more remunerative as well, all life *The Book of Isaiah, t First Book of Samuel. $ Book of Daniel. 3 o THE CONQUEST OF FEAR grew brighter. Fear was not overcome; I had only made a more or less hesitating stand against it; but even from doing that I got positive re- sults. CHAPTER II THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD IT is obvious that one could not dwell much on the power of the life-principle without coming sooner or later to the thought of God. As already hinted, I did not come to it at once because my conception of God made Him of so little use to me. And yet, in popular phraseology, I had "served" God all my life. That is, brought up in an atmosphere in which the Church was a di- vinely instituted system for utilising God, I served the system, without getting much beyond the surface plane of what were technically known as "services." When trial came such services offered me an anodyne, but not a cure. 31 32 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR II The first suggestion that my concept of God might not be sufficient to my needs came out of a conversation in New York. It was with a lady whom I met but that once, within a year or two after my experience at Versailles. I have for- gotten how we chanced on the subject, but I re- member that she asked me these questions: "When you think of God how do you think of Him? How do you picture Him? What does He seem like?" Trying to reply I recognised a certain naivete, a certain childishness, in my words even as I uttered them. In my thoughts I saw God as three supernal men, seated on three supernal thrones, enshrined in some vague celestial por- tion of space which I denominated Heaven. Between Him and me there was an incalculable distance which He could bridge but I could not. Always He had me at the disadvantage that He saw what I did, heard what I said, read what I thought, punishing me for everything THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 33 amiss, while I could reach Him only by the un- certain telephony of what I understood as prayer. Even then my telephone worked im- perfectly. Either the help I implored wasn't good for me, or my voice couldn't soar to His throne. The lady smiled, but said nothing. The smile was significant. It made me feel that a God who was no more than what I had described could hardly be the Universal Father, and set me to thinking on my own account. Ill I wish it were possible to speak of God with- out the implication of dealing with religion. By this I mean that I am anxious to keep religion out of this whole subject of the conquest of fear. The minute you touch on religion, as commonly understood, you reach the sectarian. The min- ute you reach the sectarian you start enmities. The minute you start enmities you get mental 34 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR discords. And the minute you get mental dis- cords no stand against fear is possible. But I mean a little more than this. Man, as at present developed, has shown that he hardly knows what to do with religion, or where to put it in his life. This is especially true of the Cau- casian, the least spiritually intelligent of all the great types of our race. Fundamentally the white man is hostile to religion. He attacks it as a bull a red cloak, goring it, stamping on it, tearing it to shreds. With the Caucasian as he is this fury is instinctive. Recognising religion as the foe of the materialistic ideal he has made his own he does his best to render it ineffective. Of this we need no better illustration than the state of what we conventionally know as Chris- tendom. Christendom as we see it is a purely Caucasian phase of man's struggle upward, with Caucasian merits and Caucasian defects. No- where is its defectiveness more visible than in what the Caucasian has made of the teaching of Jesus Christ. It was probably a misfortune for the world that almost from the beginning that THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 35 teaching passed into Caucasian guardianship. I see in the New Testament no indication on the part of Our Lord and the Apostles of wishing to separate themselves from Semitic co-opera- tion. The former taught daily in the Temple; the latter, as they went about the world, made the synagogue the base of all their missions. The responsibility for the breach is not under discussion here. It is enough to note that it took place, and that Caucasian materialism was thus deprived of a counteragent in Hebrew spir- itual wisdom. Had this corrective maintained its place it is possible that religion might now be a pervasive element in the Caucasian's life instead of being pigeon-holed. IV The Caucasian pigeon-holes God. Other- wise expressed, he keeps God in a specially labelled compartment of life, to be brought out for occasional use, and put back when the need is over. It is difficult to mention God to a Cau- 36 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR casian reader without inducing an artificial frame of mind. As there are people who put on for strangers and guests an affected, unnat- ural politeness different from their usual breezy- spontaneity, so the Caucasian assumes at the thought of God a mental habit which can only be described as sanctimonious. God is not nat- ural to the Caucasian; the Caucasian is not nat- ural with God. The mere concept takes him into regions in which he feels uneasy. He may call his uneasiness reserve or reverence, or by some other dignified name; but at bottom it is neither more nor less than uneasiness. To mini- mise this distress he relegates God to special days, to special hours, to services and ceremoni- als. He can thus wear and bear his uncomfort- able cloak of gravity for special times, after which he can be himself again. To appeal to God otherwise than according to the tacitly ac- cepted protocol is to the average Caucasian either annoying or in bad form. I should like^ then, to dissociate the thought of God from the artificial, sanctimonious, preter- THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 37 naturally solemn connotations which the Name is certain to bring up. I want to speak of Him with the same kind of ease as of the life-prin- ciple. I repeat, that I never found Him of much use in allaying fear till I released Him from the Caucasian pigeon-hole to see Him, as it were, in the open. Once in the open I got rid, to some degree, of the Caucasian limitations of thinking along the lines of sect, just as in the in- finitude of the air you can forget for a minute houses with rooms and walls. The discovery — that is, discovery for myself — that God is Uni- versal, which is not so obvious as it sounds, was 8 I think, the first great step I made in rinding that within that Universal fear should be impossible. About the same time I chanced on a passage written by Joseph Joubert, an eighteenth-cen- tury French Catholic, not so well known to the modern reader as he ought to be, which im- pressed me deeply. 38 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR "L'ame ne peut se mouvoir, s'eveiller, ouvrir les yeux, sans sentir Dieu. On sent Dieu avec l'ame comme on sent l'air avec le corps. Oserai- je le dire? On connait Dieu facilement pourvu qu'on ne se contraigne pas a le definir — The soul cannot move, wake, or open the eyes without perceiving God. We perceive God through the soul as we feel air on the body. Dare I say it? We can know God easily so long as we do not feel it necessary to define Him." I began to see that, like most Caucasian Chris- tians, I had been laying too much stress on the definition. The Trinity had, so to speak, come between me and the Godhead. I had, uncon- sciously, attached more importance to God's be- ing Three than to His being God. Seeing Him as Three I instinctively saw Him as Three Per- sons. Seeing Him as Three Persons I did not reflect that the word Person as applied to God must be used in a sense wholly different from that in which we employ it with regard to men. To get into what I call the open I had to bring myself to understand that we cannot enclose the THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 39 Infinite in a shape, or three shapes, resembling in any way the being with digestive organs, arms, and legs, which worked its way up from slime. That is, in order tc "dwell in the secret place of the Most High," * where one is immune from fear, I was obliged to give up the habit of em- bodying God in any form. I had to confess that what is meant by the Three Persons in One God I did not know. Furthermore, I saw no necessity for thinking that I knew, since such knowledge must transcend all scope of the hu- man mind. The formula, if you must have a formula, is one thing; but the turning it into a statute of limitations and applying it to the Il- limitable is another. To make my position clearer, and to avoid the subject of religion, let me add that, inferring from the Bible that there is a Father, a Son, and a Holy Ghost, I did not feel it imperative on my part to go beyond this use of terms. Merely to abstain from definition was like a load taken off my mind. How the Son was begotten • The Book of Psalms. 40 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR of the Father, or the Holy Ghost proceeded from them both, or what eternal mysteries were sym- bolised in this purely human phraseology, were, it seemed to me, matters with which I need not concern myself, seeing that they passed all my comprehension. Not the Trinity should come first to powers so limited as mine — but God. It dawned on me, too, that God need not necessarily be to me what He is to others, nor to others what He is to me. Of the Infinite the finite mind can only catch a finite glimpse. I see what I can see; another sees what he can see. The visions may be different, and yet each vision may be true. Just as two painters paint- ing the same landscape will give dissimilar views of it, so two minds contemplating God will take of Him only what each is fitted to receive. Water poured into differently coloured glasses will take on the colour of the cup which it fills, even though it be the self-same water in them all. If I find God for myself I shall probably not behold in Him exactly what anyone else in THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 41 the whole world or in all time has ever beheld in Him before. I saw, too, that from a certain point of view the stand of the agnostic is a right one. We cannot know God in the sense of knowing His being or His "Personality," any more than we can know the essence of the life-principle. Just as we know the life-principle only from what it does, so we know God only from such mani- festations of Himself as reach our observation. Everything else is inference. Because we see something of His goodness we infer that He is good ; because we experience something of His love we infer that He is loving; because we be- hold something of His power we infer that He is almignty. It is first of all a matter of draw- ing our conclusions, and then of making those conclusions the food of the inner spiritual man whose life is independent of the mortal heart and brain. But a sense in which God is "un- knowable" to us has to be admitted. I make this statement now in order not to be misunderstood when later I may say that God 42 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR must be this or that. Though I shall do so for the sake of brevity it will always be in the sense that, if God is what we have inferred from His manifestations, He must be this or that. In other words, having to some degree worked my own way out of fear I must tell how I came to feel that I know the Unknowable, doing it with the inexact phraseology which is all I find to hand. n Reaching the conclusions noted above I was relieved of the pressure of traditions and instruc- tions. Traditions and instructions helped me in that they built the ship in which I was to put to sea. The discoveries had to be my own. The God of whom I had heard at my mother's knee, as the phrase goes, had always been shadowy to me; the God who was served by "services" had al- ways seemed remote. A God who should be "my God," as the psalmists say so often, must, I felt, be found by me myself, through living, searching, suffering, and struggling onward a THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 43 step or two at a time. "That's pretty near free- thinking, isn't it?" a clergyman, to whom I tried to explain myself, once said to me. "No," I re- plied; "but it is pretty near thinking free." To think freely about God became a first nc cessity; to think simply a second one. The Uni- versal Father had been almost lost to me behind veil after veil of complexities. The approaches to Him seemed to have been made so round' about, requiring so many intermediaries. Long before I had dared to think of what I may call emancipation, the "scheme of salvation," as it was termed, had struck me as an excessively com- plicated system of machinery, considering the millions upon millions who had need of it. In theory you were told, according to St. Paul, to "come boldly before the throne of the heavenly grace," but in practice you were expected to do it timidly. You were expected to do it timidly because the pigeon-holed Caucasian God was represented — ■ unconsciously perhaps — as difficult, ungenial, easily offended. He measured your blindness 44 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR and weakness by the standard of His own knowl- edge and almightiness. A puritan God, ex- tremely preoccupied with morals as some people saw them, He was lenient, apparently, to the narrow-minded, the bitter of tongue, and the intolerant in heart. He was not generous. He was merciful only when you paid for His mercy in advance. To a not inconsiderable degree He was the hard Caucasian business man, of whom He was the reflection, only glorified and crowned. It will be evident, of course, that I am not speaking of "the Father" of the New Testament, nor of the official teaching of any church or the- ology. To the rank and file of Caucasians "the Father" of the New Testament is very little known, while the official teaching of churches and theologies is so hard to explain that not much of it gets over to the masses of those will- ing to subscribe to it. I refer only to the im- pression on the mind of the man in the street; and to the man in the street God, as he under- stands Him, is neither a very friendly nor a very THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 45 comprehensible element in life. Instead of miti- gating fear He adds to it, not in the Biblical sense of "fearing God," but in that of sheer ani- mal distrust. VII While turning these things over in my mind I got some help from two of the words most cur- rently in Christian use. I had long known that the English equivalents of the Latin equivalents of the terms the New Testament writers used gave but a distorted idea of the original sense; but I had let that knowledge lie fallow. The first of these words was Repentance. In these syllables there is almost no hint of the idea which fell from the evangelistic pen, while the word has been soaked in emotional and senti- mental associations it was never intended to be mixed with. The Metanoia, which painted a sober, reflective turning of the mind, had been so overcharged with the dramatic that sober, re- flective people could hardly use the expression any more. Repentance had come to have so 4 6 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR strong a gloss of the hysterical as to be almost discredited by men of common sense. It was a relief, therefore, to remember that it implied no more than a turning to God by a process of thought; and that a process of thought would find Him. The other word was Salvation. Here again our term of Latin derivation gives no more than the faintest impression of the beauty beyond beauty in that which the sacred writer used. Soteria — a Safe Return! That is all. Nothing complicated; nothing high-strung; nothing casuistical. Only a — Safe Return! Yet all human experience can be read into the little phrase, with all human liberty to wander — and come back. True, one son may never leave the Father's home, so that all that it contains is his; but there is no restraint on the other son from getting his knowledge as he will, even to the extent of becoming a prodigal. The essential is in the Safe Return, the Soteria, when the harlots and the husks have been tried and found wanting. THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 47 I do not exaggerate when I say that the sim- plicity of these conceptions was so refreshing as almost to give me a new life. One could say to God, with the psalmist, "Thou art my hiding place; thou shalt preserve me from trouble; thou shalt compass me about with songs of deliver- ance" — and mean it. One could conceive of it as possible to turn toward Him — and reach the objective. The way was open; the access was free; the progress as rapid as thought could make it. One could think of oneself as knowing God, and be aware of no forcing of the note. "We can know God easily so long as we do not feel it necessary to define Him." Once hav- ing grasped this truth I began to see how natural knowing God became. The difficulty of the forced, of the artificial, of the mere assent to what other people say, of which the Caucasian to his credit is always impatient, seemed by de- grees to melt away from me. No longer defining God I no longer tried to know Him in senses obviously impossible. I ceased trying to im- agine Him. Seeing Him as infinite, eternal, THE CONQUEST OF FEAR changeless, formless because transcending form, and indescribable because transcending words and thoughts, I could give myself up to finding Him in the ways in which He would naturally be revealed to me. VIII These, of course, were in His qualities and His works. Let me speak of the latter first. I think light was the medium through which I at once felt myself to be seeing God. By this I mean nothing pantheistic — not that the light was God — but God's first and most evident great sign. Then there was the restful darkness. There were the moon and the stars, "the hosts of heaven," as the Hebrews aptly called them, becoming more and more amazing as an ex- pression of God the more we learn how to read them. Then there were the elements, the purify- ing wind, the fruitful rain, the exhilaration of snow-storms, the action and reaction from heat and cold. Then there was beauty: first, the THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 49 beauty of the earth, of mountains, of seas, and all waters, of meadows, grainfields, orchards, gar- dens, and all growing things; then, the beauty of sound, from the soughing of the wind in the pines to the song of the hermit-thrush. There was the beauty wrought by man, music, painting, literature, and all art. There were the myriad forms of life. There were kindness and friend- ship and family affection and fun — but the time would fail me! God being the summing up of all good things, since all good things proceed from Him, must be seen by me in all good things if I am to see Him at all. I had heard from childhood of a world in which God was seen, and of another world, this world, in which He was not seen. I came to the conclusion that there was no such fantastic, unnatural division in what we call creation — that there was only one world — the world in which God is seen. "The soul cannot move, wake, or open the eyes without perceiving God." It is a question of physical vision, with spiritual comprehension. So THE CONQUEST OF FEAR IX Seeing God breaking through all that I had previously thought of as barriers, it was easy to begin to think of Him as Universal. I say begin to think, because God's Infinitude had been only a word to me hitherto, not a quality realised and felt. I do not presume to say that to any ad- equate degree I feel and realise it now; but the habit of looking on every good thing as a sign of His activity cannot but bring Him close to me. That is my chief point with regard to the Infinite — that it must be here. As I used to think of infinity I saw it stretching to boundless reaches away from me; but only from the point of view of present Good being present God did the value of the Infinite come to lie in its nearness rather than in its power of filling unim- aginable space. On my part it was inverse men- tal action, seeking God where I was capable of finding Him, and not in regions I could never range. THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 51 But having grasped the fact that the Uni- versal, wherever else it was, must be with me the purely abstract became a living influence. I felt this the more when to the concept of Infini- tude I added that of Intelligence. I use the much-worked word intelligence because there is no other; but when one thinks for a second of what must be the understanding of an Infinite Mind, intelligence as a descriptive term becomes absurdly inadequate. This was the next fact which, if I may so ex- press myself, I made my own — that not only the Universal is ever with me, but that it is ever with me with ever-active concern. There was a time when it was hard for me to believe that a Mind busied with the immensities of the universe could come down to such trivial affairs as mine. Important as I might be to myself I could hardly be otherwise than lost amid the billions of forms of life which had come into existence through the ages. To the Three in One, on the Great White Throne, in the far-away Heaven, I must be a negligible thing, except when I forced my- S2 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR self on the divine attention. Even then it was hardly conceivable that, with whole solar sys- tems to regulate, I could claim more than a pass- ing glance from the all-seeing eye. But to an Infinite Mind bathing me round and round I must be as much the object of regard as any solar system. To such a Mind nothing is small, no one thing farther from its scope than another. God could have no difficulty in attend- ing to me, seeing that from the nature of His mental activity, to put it in that way, He could not lose sight of me nor let me go. When an object is immersed in water it gives no extra trouble to the water to close round it. It can't help doing it. The object may be as small as a grain of dust or as big as a warship ; to the water it is all the same. Immersed in the Infinite Mind, closed round by it, it was giving God no extra trouble to think of me, of my work, my desires, the objects with which I was living, since by the nature of His Being He could do nothing else. Having established it with myself that Uni- THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 53 versal Presence was also Universal Thought I had made another step toward the elimination of fear. I took still another when I added the truth of Universal Love. I need hardly say that this progression was not of necessity in a strictly consecutive order, nor did it come by a process of reasoning out from point to point. I was simply the man in the street dealing with great ideas of which he had heard ever since he had been able to hear anything, but trying at last to see what they meant to him. My position might have been described in the words used by William James in one of his Letters to indicate his own. "The Divine, for my active life, is limited to abstract concepts, which, as ideals, interest and determine me, but do so but faintly, in comparison with what a feeling of God might effect, if I had one. It is largely a question of intensity, but differ- ences of intensity may make the whole centre of one's energy shift." I did have a "feeling of God" however vague; but I had more of the feeling of a Church. I could dimly discern the 54 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR Way, without going on to the Truth and the Life which give the Way its value. It will be evident then that if my "discoveries" along these lines were discoveries in the obvious, it was in that obvious to which we mortals so often remain blind. During many years the expression, the love of God, was to me like a winter sunshine, bright without yielding warmth. I liked the words; I knew they expressed a truth; but between me and the truth there was the same kind of dis- tance which I felt to lie between myself and God. "It is largely a question of intensity," to repeat what has just been quoted from William James, "but differences of intensity may make the whole centre of one's energy shift." My con- ception of the love of God lacked just that qual- ity — intensity. It came, to some degree, with the realisation that the Universal Thought must be with me. A non-loving Universal Thought was too mon- strous a concept to entertain. The God who "broke through" my many misunderstandings THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 5$ with so much good and beauty could have only one predominating motive. The coming of my spiritual being to this planet might be a mystery wrapped in darkness, and yet I could not but believe that the Universal Father was behind that coming and that I was His son. I could rest my case there. The love of God, after hav- ing long been like a doctrinal tenet for which one had to strive, became reasonable, natural, something to be understood. Finding that love in so many places in which I had seen mere physical phenomena, and in so many lovely things I had never placed to its credit, I began to feel that life could be infused and transformed by it, in proportion as my own perception grew. So, little by little, the centre of energy shifted, as one came to understand what the Sons of Korah meant when they sang, "God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore will we not fear though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea." * With Universal * The Book of Psalms. 56 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR Thought concentrated in love upon oneself fear must be forced backward. And especially when you add to that the con- cept of Almighty Power. This fourth and last of the great attributes is the one with which I, as an individual, have found it most difficult to clothe the Infinite. I mean that it is the one for which it is hardest for me to develop what William James calls "a feeling," an inner realisation. I lay no stress upon this. It is a question of growth. The Presence, the Thought, the Love have become to me what I may be per- mitted to call tremulously vivid. In proportion as they are vivid I get the "feeling" of Almighti- ness exercised on my behalf; in proportion as they are tremulous the Almightiness may remain in my consciousness, but it seems exercised on my behalf but slightly. In other words, the Infinitude of Thought and Love are, to some extent, apprehended by my inner self, while the Infinitude of Power is as yet to me rather an intellectual abstraction. What my inner self may be I am not prepared to THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 57 say, but I know that it is there, as everyone else knows that it is in him. "Strengthened with might by the Spirit in the inner man," * is what St. Paul says, and I suppose most of us recognise the fact that our inner self is stronger or weaker in proportion as it is more nourished or less nourished by our sense of the Being of God. It is largely a question of intensity. If I interpret William James aright he means by "a feeling'* an intellectual concept after it has passed beyond the preliminary keeping of the brain, and be- come the possession of that inner man which is the vital self. To this vital self the sense of Almighty Power really used for me is still, to a great degree, outside my range. X I make the confession not because it is of in- terest, but because it illustrates a main deduction which I should now like to draw. It is to the effect that God is with us to be utilised. His * Epistle to the Ephesians. 58 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR Power, His Love, His Thought, His Presence, must be at our disposal, like other great forces, such as sunshine and wind and rain. We can use them or not, as we please. That we could use them to their full potentiality is, of course, not to be thought of; but we can use them in proportion to our ability. If I, the individual, still lack many things; if I am still a prey to lingering fears; it is probably because I have not yet rooted out a stubborn disbelief in His Power. If I succeed in this I shall doubtless be able to seize more of His bounty. It is not a question of His giving, but of my capacity to take. The contrary, I venture to think, is the point of view of most of us. We consider God some- what as we do a wealthy man whom we know to be a miser, forming the shrewd surmise that we shall not get much out of him. The God who fails to protect us from fear fails, I believe, be- cause we see Him first of all as a niggard God. He is a niggard not merely with regard to money but all the good things for which He has given us a desire, with no intention of allowing that THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 59 desire to be gratified. Once more, He is the hard Caucasian business man, whom His subor- dinates serve because they don't see what else to do, but whom they rarely love. We shall not, in my judgment, overcome fear till we see Him as He surely must be, generous beyond all our conceptions of generosity. Years, experience, many trials, and some knowledge of the world, have convinced me that we have no lawful or harmless cravings for which, as far as God is concerned, there is not abundant satis- faction. I am convinced that absolute con- fidence in God's overflowing liberality of every sort is essential to the conquest of fear. If we don't profit by that liberality the fault is not His but our own. I am tempted to think that the belief of so many generations of nominal Christians in a God whose power was chiefly shown in repressions, denials, and capricious dis- appointments is responsible, in so small measure, for our present world-distress. In my own case it was a matter of re-educa- tion. To find God for myself I had to be willing 60 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR to let some of my old cherished ideas go. They may have been true of God as He reveals Him- self to others; they are not true of Him as He makes Himself known to me. The Way that leads me to the Truth and the Life is undoubt- edly the Way I must follow. Doing that I have found so much, mentally, emotionally, materially, which I never had be- fore, that I cannot but look for more as my ab- sorbing power increases. The process is akin to that of the unshrivelling of the inner man, as a bud will unfold when the sunshine becomes strong enough. The transformation must be in bought. There must be first the Metanoia, the change of mind, the new set of concepts; and then the Soteria, the Safe Return, to the high, sane ideal of a co-operative Universe, with a lov- ing, lavish Universal Heart behind it. "To the chief Musician for the Sons of Korah : " 'God is our refuge and strength, a very pres- ent help in trouble. Therefore will we not fear though the earth be removed, and though the THE LIFE-PRINCIPLE AND GOD 61 mountains be carried into the midst of the sea. . . . Come, behold the works of the Lord. . . . He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, he cutteth the spear in sunder, he burneth the chariot in the fire. . . . Be still then, and know that I am God/ " * *Book of Psalms. CHAPTER III GOD AND HIS SELF-EXPRESSION IT will be clear from what I have said already that I see no fundamental conquest of fear that is not based in God. There may be knacks by which fear can be nipped and ex- pedients by which it may be outwitted, but its extermination can be brought about, it seems to me, only in one way. According to our capacity and our individual needs we must know God; and knowing God is not as difficult as the Cau- casian mind is apt to think. It stands to reason that if knowing God, in the senses in which it is possible to know Him, is so essential to mankind it could not be difficult. The making it difficult is part of the dust the Caucasian throws in his own eyes. 62 GOD AND HIS SELF-EXPRESSION 63 We know God through His Self-Expression, and His Self-Expression is round about us in every form. Except through His Self-Expres- sion there is no way of our knowing Him. No speculation or theory will teach us to know Him. It must be His own revelation of Himself, or nothing. II Such little knowledge of Him as has come to me came much more freely when I began to look for that revelation not alone in solemn mys- teries, or through the mediumship of prophets, apostles, and ancient scriptures, but in the sights and sounds and happenings of every day. Here I must ask not to be misunderstood. The solemn mysteries have their place, but it is one of cli- max. The mediumship of prophets, apostles, and ancient scriptures is of unreckonable value, after I have done something for myself. By this I do not mean that all cannot work together simultaneously, but rather that it is useless for 64 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR the soul to strike only at the more advanced, having ignored the elementary. As I write I look out on a street full of the touches of spring. The rain-washed grass is of bright new green. The elms are in tenderest leaf, the hawthorn bursting into flower. Here and there a yellow clump of forsythia is like a spot of sunshine. Tulips are opening their varie- gated cups, and daffodils line the walls. Dogs are capering about, a collie, a setter, a Boston terrier. Birds are carrying straws or bits of string to weave into their nests — or singing — or flying — or perching on boughs. Children are playing — boys on bicycles eagerly racing no- where — little girls with arms round each others' waists, prattling after their kind. Overhead is a sky of that peculiar blue for which the Chinese have a word which means "the blue of the sky after rain," a hue which only these masters in colour have, to my knowledge, specially ob- served. How can I help seeing so much beauty and sweetness as the manifestation of God? How GOD AND HIS SELF-EXPRESSION 65 could He show Himself to me more smilingly? How can I talk of not seeing God when I see this? True, it may be no more than the tip of the fringe of the hem of the robe in which His Being is arrayed; but at least it must be that. True, also, that beautiful as these things appear to physical eyes they must be still more beautiful to spiritual eyes — the eyes of those who have passed on, for instance — to say nothing of the delight which God must have in them Himself. But even with my imperfect mortal vision they are rapturously good, a veritable glimpse of the Divine. This is what I mean by the elementary — the common, primary thing, the thing I look at every day and hardly ever accredit to its source. I am not speaking pantheistically here, any more than when I spoke of light. These things are not God, or part of God. They are expressions of God. If I speak of seeing God in them I mean that in them, as well as in many other simple things, we see Him as nearly as is possible to such comprehension as ours. "No human eye," 66 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR writes St. John, "has ever seen God: the only Son, who is in the Father's bosom — He has made Him known." * He made Him known in His own Person ; but He appealed also to the every- day sights and sounds, the lily of the field, the blowing wind, the sparrow falling, the children at their mothers' knees, for the evidence to de- clare Him. As expressions of Him they may be misinterpreted by the error in my physical senses, or distorted by my limitations of spir- itual perception; but even then they bring Him near to me in the kind of radiance which I can catch. Ill In order to banish fear I think it necessary to train the thought to seeing God as expressing Himself in all the good and pleasant and enjoy- able things that come to us. This means forming a habit. It means saying to oneself daily, hourly, "This is God," "That is God," of incidents, per- sons, and things we have rarely thought of in that * Most of the quotations from the New Testament are taken from a recent translation, "The New Testament in Modern Speech," by R. F. Weymouth and E. Hampden-Cook. GOD AND HIS SELF-EXPRESSION 67 relation. To do this is not as easy as it would be if our race-mind worked that way; but un- fortunately it does not. In general we take our good things for granted, complaining that they are not better. The things we lack are more vivid to us, as a rule, than those we have ac- quired. Having hung, as it were, a cloud about ourselves we disregard the uncountable ways in which God persists in shining through, in spite of our efforts to shut Him out. To try to enumerate the uncountable would be folly. You cannot reckon the good which comes to every one of us through such channels as family, home, friendship, income, business, amusements, studies, holidays, journeys, sports, books, pictures, music, and the other hardly noticed pleasures of any single day. We are used to them. To ascribe them specially to God would seem to us far-fetched. That is, the- oretically we may ascribe them to God, but prac- tically we dissociate Him from them. Few of us, I think, ever pause to remember that through 68 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR them He is making Himself known to us before doing it in any other way. And yet, it seems to me, this is the beginning of our recognition of the Divine. I have little hesitation in saying that this is what parents should teach children before they teach them to lisp prayers. The prayers have hardly any meaning to the baby-mind, and not much more than a sentimental influence on the later life, if they have as much as that. But any child, from the very budding of the intelligence, could grasp the idea of a great, loving Super-Father, who was making Himself visible through gifts and care. If he prayed to Him later he would know to whom he was praying. As it is, the later pray- ers are neglected, or definitely given up, oftener than not, because this is precisely what the child does not know. He does not know it because he was never taught it; and he was never taught it because his parents have probably not been aware of it themselves. GOD AND HIS SELF-EXPRESSION 69 IV I myself was never taught it. Notwithstand- ing all for which I am truly grateful, I regret most deeply that so many years of my life went by before I was led to the fact. I am willing to believe that the lack of understanding was my own fault, but a lack of understanding there was. I got the impression that God, so far from mak- ing Himself known to me, was hiding away from me, and that I must have faith to believe in One of whom I had no more than hearsay evidence. If I could do this violence to such measure of reason as I possessed I could count on a reward in some other world than this, though on little or nothing here. Faith I saw as of the nature of a tour de force. You took it as you took a leap. It was spiritually acrobatic. You didn't understand but you be- lieved. The less you understood the more credit your belief became to you. The more hidden and difficult and mysterious and unintelligible God made Himself the greater your merit in 70 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR having faith in spite of everything. I am far from saying that this is the common understand- ing of Christians, or from holding others re- sponsible for my misconceptions. I speak of these misconceptions only because they were mine, and it was I who had to work away from them. For this reason, too, I speak of my reaching the idea of a God who had been visibly smiling at me all my life while I had never seen Him, as a "discovery." To me it was a discovery; and it came at a moment when I sorely needed some- thing of the kind. V It was perhaps three or four years after the turning-point at Versailles. The intervening time had been one of what I may call spiritual ups and downs. It had not all been straight progress by any means. I had got hold of what for me was a great idea, round which other great ideas grouped themselves; but I grasped them waveringly or intermittently. Nevertheless, GOD AND HIS SELF-EXPRESSION 71 during seasons in Boston, Nice, Cannes, Munich, London, and Berlin, life on the whole went hopefully. The malady I have already men- tioned tended to grow better rather than worse; the advancing blindness became definitely ar- rested. I worked easily, happily, successfully. Returning to the New England city which had become my adopted home, I bought a house and settled down to American life once more. I mention these facts only because they help me to make myself clearer. For all at once my affairs, like the chariots of Pharaoh in crossing the Red Sea, began to drive heavily. Trust in an all-conquering life-principle which had meant much to me for a time no longer seemed effective. Difficulties massed themselves. Busi- ness misunderstandings sprang up. Friendships on which I had counted suddenly grew cold. Worse than all, the working impulse gave out. There were two whole years in which I slaved at producing little more than what had to be thrown away. My active life had apparently come to another deadening full stop. 72 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR I reached the decision that there was but one thing to do — give up the pretence at working, sell the house to which I had grown attached, and resume once more the life of aimless, but at that time inexpensive, European wandering. There came a day when I actually offered my house for sale. And yet that day proved to be another turning- point. On the very morning when I had put my house in the market the chain of small events which we commonly call accidents brought me into touch with a man I had never seen before. During a first meeting, as well as in several that followed, he made certain matters clear to me which changed my course not only then but ever since. These explanations came under three distinct headings, to each of which I should like to give a little space. VI Of these the one I put first is probably familiar to most of my readers, but to me, I confess, it was new. GOD AND HIS SELF-EXPRESSION 73 God among His other functions must be a tireless activity working towards an end. Every- thing He calls into being works toward that end, I myself with the rest. I am not a purposeless bit of jetsam flung out on the ocean of time to be tossed about helplessly. God couldn't so will an existence. It would not be in keeping with His economy to have any entity wasted. As Our Lord puts it, the sparrow cannot fall with- out Him ; without Him the lilies are not decked ; the knowledge possessed by His infinite intelli- gence is so minute that the very hairs of the head are numbered. My life, my work, myself — all are as much a necessary part of His design as the thread the weaver weaves into the pattern in a carpet. In other words, I am not a free agent. I am His agent. Not only am I responsible to Him, but He is responsible for me. His responsibility for me will be seen as soon as I give up being responsible for myself. 1 It was upon this last point that I seized with most avidity. I was tired of trying to steer a 74 THE CONQUEST OF FEAR course for myself, with no compass to go by. I was tired of incessantly travelling along roads which seemed to lead to nothing but blind-ends. To change the figure to one I used not infre- quently at that time, my life seemed pitchforked, first in one way and then in another, no way bringing me anywhere. It had no even tenor. It was a series of seismic pulls and jerks. But in the light of what my new friend told me I saw I had been too busily engaged in di- recting my life for myself. I was like a child who hopes to make a smoothly working machine go still more smoothly by prodding it. I couldn't leave it alone. It had not occurred to me that the course of that life was God's own business, and that if I could follow the psalm- ist's advice and "commit my way unto him he would bring it to pass." It had seemed to me that nothing would be brought to pass unless I worried and fretted over it myself, whereas the same wise old psalmist says, in words which our generation would do well to lay to heart, "fret not thyself else shalt thou be moved to do evil," GOD AND HIS SELF-EXPRESSION 7$ "Trust in the Lord and do good," he goes on; "so shalt thou dwell in the land, and verily thou shalt be fed. Delight thyself also in the Lord, and he shall give thee the desires of thine heart." This was nothing new; it was only new to me. To feel that I could give up being responsible for results and devote myself to my work was in itself a relief. If I tried to "trust in the Lord and do good" — by which I suppose is meant doing my duty to the best of my small ability — He would look after the rest. My position was somewhat that of a trusted subordinate given a free hand, but having over him a supreme au- thority taking charge of all consequences. I was not working on what our modern idiom neatly summarises as "my own." /