The False God of Fear and the Fear of Death : Part 2

The Conquest of Fear
by Basil King

(Page 9 of 16)

In our expressive American vernacular we speak of "wishing" conditions on others, an instinctive folk-recognition of the force of mentality. We do it in a sinister sense more often than by way of helpfulness. We "wish" by thinking, by talking, by creating an atmosphere, by forcing things into the general consciousness. Old age and decay, bad enough in themselves, we intensify by our habits of mind. Death, which in any case awaits our friends, we woo to them by anticipations of demise. It is not ill-intentioned. It comes out of a subconsciousness in which death and not life is the base.

IV

For most of us the fear of death is a subconscious rather than an active fear. It becomes active for those who through illness, or in some other way, see a sentence of death hanging over them; but during the greater part of the life-span we are able to beat it off.

As to the life-span itself there is reason to suppose that it is meant to be more regular than man allows it to become. There may easily be an "appointed time" to which we do not suffer ourselves, or each other, to attain. Those strange, inequalities by which one human being is left to pass over the century mark, another is cut off just when he is most needed, while a third does no more than touch this plane for an hour or two, may be the results of our misreadings of God's Will, and not the decrees of that Will itself.

We are here on ground which may be termed that of speculation; and yet speculation is not quite the right word. I dare to think that we have reached a stage of our development at which we are entitled to make with regard to death certain inferences which were hardly possible before our time. We may make them timidly, with all hesitation and reserve, aware that we cannot propound them as facts; and yet we may make them. The human mind is no longer where it was a hundred years ago, still less where it was five hundred years ago. Though we make little progress we make some. We are not always marking time on the same spot of ignorance and helplessness. What is mystery for one age is not of necessity mystery for another. Even when mysteries remain, they do not of necessity remain without some hint of a dawn which may broaden into day. Many of our most precious illuminations have come in just this way; a faint light - which slowly, feebly, through centuries perhaps, waxes till it becomes a radiance.

V

I talked some time ago to an orthodox Christian lady whose brother had recently died, and who was speaking of death.

"The one mystery," she called it, "on which no single ray of light has been vouchsafed in all the ages man has been on earth."

I did not agree with her, but knowing her to be an orthodox Christian lady I did not venture to express my opinion.

But hers is the position which many, perhaps most, of us take. "No one has ever come back," we say, "to tell us what his experience has been," and we drop the subject there. Not only do we drop the subject there, but we resent it if everyone else does not drop the subject there. "God has hidden it from us," we declare, "and what He has hidden from us it is presumption for us to pry into." It is useless to urge the fact that this way of reasoning would have kept us still in the Stone Age; we are not to be reached by argument.

Let me say at once that I am not taking up the question of the psychic, or entering into it at all. I shall keep myself to the two points of view which have helped me, as an individual, to overcome, to some degree, the fear of death, considering them in reverse order from that in which I have mentioned them. Those two points of view are:

A. That, according to God's Will, we come into this phase of being for an "appointed time" which we do not always reach;

B. That we pass out of this phase of being as we came into it, for Growth.

VI

A. The question of an appointed time seems important chiefly to the right understanding of God's love. Between us and the understanding of that love bereavement is often a great obstacle. Oftener still it is a great puzzle. I do not have to catalogue the conditions in which the taking away of men, women, and children, sorely needed here if for no other purpose than to love, has moved us to deep perplexity, or to something like a doubt of God. We have probably all known cases where such tragedy has driven sufferers to renounce God altogether, and to curse Him. Some of us who have been smitten may have come near to doing this ourselves, or may have done it.

VII

I have already spoken of the Caucasian's habit of shuffling off on God those ills for which he will not face the responsibility himself, and I am inclined to think that this is one of them. In my own experience the explanation of "God's Will" made to the mother of a little family left fatherless, or to the parents of a dead baby, or to a young man with a young wife in her coffin, has always been revolting. I have made it; I have tried, on the faith of others, to think it must be so. I have long since ceased to think it, and feel happier for not crediting the Universal Father with any such futile tricks.

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.