The Mind of Today and the World : Part 3

The Conquest of Fear
by Basil King

(Page 8 of 17)

If we could compare ourselves with our descendants of five hundred or a thousand years hence we should probably be amazed at our present futility and grossness. Our ancestors in the Middle Ages could do certain great things, as we, too, can do certain great things; but in general access to the Universal Storehouse which is God we have made progress in ways unknown to them, as our children will make such progress after us.

But we have made only the progress we have made. We have its advantages, but there are advantages to which we have not yet attained. We might liken ourselves to people who have reached the fourth or fifth step of a stairway in which there are twenty or thirty. We have climbed to a certain height, but we are far from having reached the plane to which we are ascending.

VII

It is worth noting this for the reason that we are so likely to think of ourselves as the climax to which the ages have worked up, and after which there is no beyond. We are the final word, or as the French express it, the last cry, le dernier cri. All that can be felt we have felt, all that can be known we have experienced. For the most part this stand is taken by the intellectuals in all modern countries. In us of to-day, of this very hour, the wave of Eternity has broken, throwing nothing at our feet but froth. The literature of the past ten years is soaked in the pessimism of those who regret that this should be all that the travail of Time could produce for us.

In view of this moan from so many of the writers who have the public ear, especially in Europe, it is the more important to keep before us the fact that we are children of a race but partially developed at best. Compared with what will one day be within human scope our actual reach is only a little beyond impotence. I say this not merely at a venture, but on the strength of what has happened in the past. We are not a people which has accomplished much, but one on the way to accomplishment. The achievements of which we can boast are relatively like those of a child of five who boasts that he can count. Our whole world-condition shows us to be racially incompetent, and able to produce no more than incompetent leaders. That is our present high-water mark, and with our high-water mark we must learn to be satisfied.

Escaping from matter we are still within the grasp of matter, and shall probably so continue for generations to come. Our struggles must therefore be largely with matter, till little by little we achieve its domination. In proportion as the individual does so now he reaps the reward of his victory; and in proportion as he reaps that reward fear is overcome. Our primary fear being fear of matter, much is gained by grasping the fact which modern science for the past ten or fifteen years has been carefully putting before us - vainly as far as most of us are concerned - that what we call matter is a force subject to the control of mind, while the directing of mind rests wholly with ourselves. Since we have controlled matter to make it in so many ways a hostile force, it ought to be within our power to turn it in our favour.

VIII

Which is, I suppose, the trend we are following, even if we follow it unconsciously. For the turning of the matter in our favour we have fortunately some notable examples. Our race has produced one perfectly normal man to whom all of us sub-normals can look as the type of what we are one day to become.

I think it a pity that so much of our thought of Him makes Him an exception to human possibilities. In speaking of Him as the Son of God we fancy Him as being in another category from ourselves. We forget that we, too, are sons of God - "heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ." It is true that He realised that Sonship to a degree which we do not; but it is also true that we ourselves realise it to some degree. In the detail of the mastery of matter to which we shall attain it is fair, I think, to take Him as our standard.

Taking Him as our standard we shall work out, I venture to think, to the following points of progress.

a. The control of matter in furnishing ourselves with food and drink, by means more direct than at present employed, as He turned water into wine and fed the multitudes with the loaves and fishes.

b. The control of matter by putting away from ourselves, by methods more sure and less roundabout than those of to-day, sickness, blindness, infirmity, and deformity.

c. The control of matter by regulating our atmospheric conditions as He stilled the tempest.

d. The control of matter by restoring to this phase of existence those who have passed out of it before their time, or who can ill be spared from it, as He "raised" three young people from "the dead" and Peter and Paul followed His example.

e. The control of matter in putting it off and on at will, as He in His death and resurrection.

f. The control of matter in passing altogether out of it, as He in what we call His Ascension into Heaven.

About the Author

William Benjamin Basil King (1859-1928) was a Canadian-born clergyman who became a writer after retiring from the clergy due to loss of eyesight and thyroid disease. His novels and non-fiction were spiritually oriented. King retired from the clergy in 1900 due to illness, and began writing. His anonymously published novel The Inner Shrine, about a French Irish girl whose husband is killed in a duel, became very popular when published in 1909. King wrote a number of best-selling works.