The Conquest of Fear

by Basil King

XVIII

Next to sickness I should place poverty as the second of the two great trials we bring upon ourselves.

Under poverty I class all sense of restriction, limitation, and material helplessness. As the subject will be taken up more in detail elsewhere I wish for the minute to say no more than this: that, in an existence of which Growth seems to be the purpose, God could not intend that any of us should be without full power of expansion.

What we are worth to him we must be worth as individuals; and what we are worth as individuals must depend on the peculiar combination of qualities which goes to make up each one of us. I, poor creature that I sometimes seem to others and always to myself, am so composed that God never before had anything exactly like me in the whole round of His creation. My value lies in a special blend of potentialities. Of the billions and trillions of human beings who have passed across this planet not one could ever have done what I can do, or have filled my place toward God and His designs.

Among the billions and trillions I may seem trivial—to men. I may even seem trivial to myself. To such numbers as these I can add so little when I come, and take away so little from them when I go, that I am not worth counting. Quite so—to all human reckoning. But my value is not my value to men; it is not even my value to myself; it is my value to God. He alone knows my use, and the peculiar beauty I bring to the ages in making my contribution. It is no presumptuous thing to say that He could no more spare me than any other father of a normal and loving family could spare one of the children of his flesh and blood.

Now, my value to God is my first reckoning. We commonly make it the last, if we ever make it at all; but it is the first and the ruling one.

What I am to my family, my country, myself, is all secondary. They determine only the secondary results. The first results come from my first relationship, and my first relationship is to God. As the child of my parents, as a citizen of my country, as a denizen of this planet, my place is a temporary one. As the son of God I am from everlasting to everlasting, a splendid being with the universe as my home.

Now this, it seems to me, is my point of departure for the estimate of my possible resources. I cannot expect less of the good things of the universe than God would naturally bestow on His son. To expect less is to get less, since it is to dwarf my own power of receiving. If I close the opening through which abundance flows it cannot be strange if I shut abundance out.

And that is precisely what we find throughout the human race, millions upon millions of lives tightly shut against His generosity. The most generous treatment for which the majority of us look is man's. The only standard by which the majority of us appraise our work is man's. You have a job; you get your twenty or thirty or fifty or a hundred dollars a week for it; and by those dollars you judge your earning capacity and allow it to be judged. You hardly ever pause to remember that there is an estimate of earning capacity which measures industry and good will and integrity and devotion, and puts them above all tricks of trade and rewards them—rewards them, I mean, not merely in mystical blessings in eons far off, possibly the highest blessings we shall ever know, but rewards them in a way that will satisfy you now.

"He satisfieth the empty soul," writes the psalmist, in one of the sublimest lyrics ever penned, "and filleth the hungry soul with goodness."

"Yes, of course," says the Caucasian. "When you have crushed out all your present cravings and forgotten them, He will give you joys of which now you have no conception."

But are not my present cravings those which count for me? and do they not make up precisely that character which renders me unique? True, my longings now may have to the longings I shall one day entertain only the relation of your little boy's craving for an alphabetic picture-book to the course in philosophy he will take when he is twenty-five; but so long as the picture-book is the thing he can appreciate you give it to him. Is not this common sense? And can we expect the Father of us all to act in other than common-sense ways?

It is because we do so expect—because we do so almost universally—that we have blocked the channels of His blessings. The world is crowded with men and women working their fingers to the bone, and even so just squeaking along betwixt life and death and dragging their children after them. They are the great problem of mankind; they rend the heart with pity. They rend the heart with pity all the more for the reason that there is no sense in their poverty. There is no need of it. God never willed it, and what God never willed can go out of life with the speed of Satan out of Heaven. We have only to fulfil certain conditions, certain conditions quite easy to fulfil, to find the stores of the Universal laid as a matter of course at the feet of the sons of God.

"Prove me now herewith, saith the Lord of Hosts," are the striking words of the prophet Malachi, "if I will not open you the windows of heaven and pour you out a blessing that there shall not be room enough to receive it.... And all nations shall call you blessed, for ye shall be a delightsome land,"