The Conquest of Fear

The Conquest of Fear is a short prose treatise on the spiritual overcoming of fear by the Canadian-American novelist and Episcopal-trained writer Basil King, first published by Doubleday in 1921. Drawing partly on his own near-blindness and ill health, King argues that fear is the foundational obstacle of Western life, that habitual courage is best built through interior recognition of one's grounding in 'the Force, the Power, the Spirit, the Mind' behind appearances, and that practical relief comes through daily, almost contemplative, mental work. The book sits at the boundary between Christian devotional writing and the American New Thought tradition.

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.

Chapter I, "Fear and the Life-Principle"

First lines

When 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 childhood 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.

Contents

Reception

The Conquest of Fear was a bestseller in the early 1920s in the United States and Britain and was read alongside Émile Coué's Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion and Wallace D. Wattles's New Thought titles in the same decade. Twentieth-century critics tended to treat it as period-piece self-help; recent New Thought historians (Mitch Horowitz, Catherine Albanese) read it as a document of the early 20th-century crossover between Anglican Christianity and metaphysical mind-cure thought. Cosimo Classics and other public-domain houses have kept the text continuously in print; King's reputation otherwise rests mainly on his novel The Inner Shrine.

Frequently asked

What is The Conquest of Fear about?

Basil King argues that fear is the foundational obstacle of Western life, and that overcoming it requires interior recognition of a spiritual grounding — what he calls 'the Force, the Power, the Spirit, the Mind' behind appearances. The book draws on his own experience of near-blindness and frames the problem at the boundary of Christian devotion and New Thought.

When was The Conquest of Fear first published?

First published by Doubleday in 1921. It became a bestseller in both the United States and Britain in the early 1920s, read alongside similar New Thought works of the decade. The text is now in the public domain.

What is Basil King's background?

William Benjamin Basil King (1859–1928) was a Canadian-born Anglican clergyman who became a novelist and essayist after deteriorating eyesight forced his retirement from parish ministry. He served parishes in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and Cambridge, Massachusetts.