The key ideas

The Conquest of Fear

Basil King, 1921

Why do we fear almost all the time, when trouble comes so rarely? Basil King, losing his sight and his ability to work, began writing down what helped him hold on. The result is a book about how a change of view on difficulties, on people and on God weakens the fear of the future, of other people's enmity and of poverty.

Who it is for

For those who wake up thinking “well, what now?”, expect a catch from people, and lie awake at dawn over money. And for anyone curious how a man of the early twentieth century looked for support against fear in faith.

We are forever comparing our darkest moments with our friends' brightest ones.

Well, what now?

Think back to a morning when anxiety wakes up before you do. Before you have even opened your eyes, you are thinking about tiresome chores and an unpleasant conversation. Basil King describes this feeling in the first lines of his book, and he is sure almost everyone knows it. A mother fears for her children, a father for his business, an employee for his job. We do not fall ill all the time, and we do not make mistakes all the time, yet, by his account, we are afraid almost constantly.

For King himself, fear was the background of his whole life. As a child he was afraid to go to bed, then he was afraid of school, and by his youth he had a familiar formula before every new event: “Well, what now?” It is strange, he recalls, that nobody ever taught him to fight fear. Fear was considered as much a given as death.

The book The Conquest of Fear appeared in 1921, and it was written not by a theorist. By then King had spent several years losing his sight and was seriously ill. He warns at once: there will be no recipe, only an honest record of one person's experience.

King's support is religious. He believed that the world is friendly to man and that God does not punish but helps. We retell these thoughts as his convictions, not as proven facts. Ahead come a barking dog at the porch, a conversation with a stranger about how he pictured God, forty-eight hours that changed his work, and sleepless dawns over money.

A River Flows Around a Stone

As a small boy King often went on errands to a house where a barking Skye terrier met him. From the first steps up the driveway his knees trembled. Even then it seemed to him that such terror had no place in life. He had no further reasoning than that: he simply dragged himself to the porch, and the enemy always ran off.

Years later fear caught up with him for real. Ill, losing his sight, without work, he spent one autumn alone among the sad parks of Versailles. Then he recalled a thought once put to him by a teacher: life on Earth has never given up. It was driven out of the water, and it came onto land. Driven on land, it rose into the air. Against one danger it grew a shell, against another a sting, in the cold a fur coat, and when cast ashore it grew lungs.

From this King drew his main point. Animals before man, he reasons, knew no anxiety in advance: it needs memory and imagination. So the capacity to fear appeared together with the mind, that is, together with the ability to look for a way out. In King's view, fear calls for new strength to be brought into play rather than passing a sentence. And if a path cannot be forced straight through, it can be gone around, as a river flows around a rock it cannot wash over.

The method is simple to state and hard to practise. Do not run from people and circumstances, but act as if life were arranged for your good, as it once seemed with the terrier. When dejection or self-pity came over him, King repeated one and the same phrase: the task before him was his own, and he must take it up as though everything needed were already at hand.

People turned out to be friendlier, things went more easily, fear grew less, and his head was freed for work. He did not manage to conquer fear, King admits. He only hesitantly resisted it, but even that gave a noticeable result.

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About the author

Basil King (1859-1928), a Canadian writer and former Anglican priest. He left the ministry because of illness and failing eyesight and became the author of popular novels and books on faith.

All books by this author: Basil King

Terms from the book

  • Paul
  • Tuberculosis
  • Skye terrier: A breed of small long-haired dogs from the Scottish island of Skye.
  • Joubert: Joseph Joubert (1754-1824), a French writer and moralist, known for his notebooks of short reflections.
  • Saranac: Saranac Lake, a town in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York State. At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century it was a well-known place for treating tuberculosis.
  • Stratford-on-Avon: A small English town where William Shakespeare was born.
  • Metanoia: A Greek word from the New Testament, usually translated as “repentance”. King understands it as a calm turn of mind, a change of view.
  • Mammon: A word from the Gospel meaning wealth. For King it is the image of a false god: the belief that everything needed for life depends only on money and economic laws.

All terms

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