Fox read Jesus's sermon as a method of spiritual healing. Early AA members passed his book around; its promise that thought controls circumstances goes much further than advice about worry.
A reading guide /New Thought and early AA/ 8 min read
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Emmet Fox read the promise that the meek would inherit the earth as a way to gain control over your health and circumstances. In his Sermon on the Mount, being meek means letting God direct your life. The result, he says, includes physical healing.
That is the claim behind his 1934 book. Fox thought Jesus had taught spiritual laws that anyone could learn to use. In his account, fear, resentment, and fixed opinions produce trouble; a changed consciousness allows divine power to put things right. He meant changes in the world as well as changes in the person praying.
Carl Bloch, The Sermon on the Mount, 1877. Fox's book interprets Matthew 5 to 7; this painting is a later depiction of the sermon.
Fox led the Divine Science Church of the Healing Christ in New York. Divine Science belongs to New Thought, a movement that connects spiritual healing with the power of thought. During the Depression, he addressed audiences in the Hippodrome and later Carnegie Hall. Unity's account of his ministry places the book within that religious setting.
Emmet Fox in Divine Science News, 1944.
The claim
Thought as the cause of experience
Fox starts from a distinction between the material world we normally see and a spiritual reality governed by higher laws. For him, prayer brings a person into contact with those laws, overcoming limitations that seemed unavoidable.
Chapter 1 imagines a patient recovering through prayer despite a doctor's prediction of surgery or death, and a legal disaster dissolving the same way. He calls this scientific prayer because he believes it works according to laws. The name supplies no experimental proof.
We have free will, but our free will lies in our choice of thought.The Sermon on the Mount, chapter 1, "What Did Jesus Teach?"
Fox says that our experience expresses our inner thought, including thoughts we have forgotten or never recognized. In chapter 2, unconscious mental states help explain why a person might face conditions they did not consciously choose.
He also rejects the idea that sin permanently cuts someone off from God. Anyone can return to a loving Father and receive help. That hope does not require accepting his claim that every difficulty has a mental cause.
The Gospel and Fox
Three passages, with his interpretation
Fox claims to recover Jesus's original meaning. Compare his interpretations with Matthew, linked here in the King James Version he uses. The accounts of Fox are paraphrases.
choose a passage, or use the arrow keys
The Beatitudes
What does it mean to inherit the earth?
Matthew 5:5 says, "Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth." The neighboring blessings name mourners, the merciful, peacemakers, and people persecuted for righteousness.
Fox gives both central words special meanings. The earth is your outward experience, from bodily health to the rest of your affairs. Meekness combines an open mind with faith that God's will is better than the outcome you have planned. To inherit the earth is to gain power over those conditions through prayer.
There is a recognizable religious demand here: surrender your self-will. The promise of mastery over circumstances is a further step. Matthew's sentence does not itself define the earth as an individual's health and affairs. Fox supplies that definition from his metaphysics.
Yielding to God's will brings dominion over your outward experience.
Paraphrase of Fox, chapter 2, "The Beatitudes," discussion of Matthew 5:5.
Turning the other cheek
An instruction about conduct becomes a rule of thought
In Matthew 5:38 to 42, Jesus answers the rule of equal retaliation with examples: offer the other cheek, give up the cloak as well as the coat, go a second mile, and give to someone who asks. These are instructions about conduct.
Fox says Jesus is concerned with states of consciousness and gives no instructions about the details of external conduct. He treats cheek, coat, and mile as illustrations of mental nonresistance. Concentrate on God's presence in the troubling person or situation rather than anger or fear, and the trouble will lose its power.
Refusing revenge connects his reading to the passage. His further claim is that the changed thought can alter the aggressor: he recounts quarrels and even dog fights ending when an observer prayed. Those anecdotes illustrate his belief; they cannot establish the cause of the change.
Turn your thought toward divine love, and the hostile condition will dissolve.
Paraphrase of Fox, chapter 4, "Resist Not Evil," discussion of Matthew 5:38 to 48.
Prayer and forgiveness
Daily bread includes more than food
Matthew 6:11 asks, "Give us this day our daily bread." Fox includes food and material necessities, then extends bread to a firsthand experience of God's presence. He distinguishes thinking about God from feeling that presence, which he calls realization.
He reads the prayer's opening as a loving parent welcoming all people into one family. Its request for forgiveness then requires work from the person praying. You must release resentment against others and, after stopping your own wrongdoing, accept forgiveness yourself.
Fox makes a useful distinction between forgiveness and liking someone. In his account, goodwill does not require forcing an affectionate feeling. But he also says unresolved resentment can explain unanswered prayer. A person who remains ill or in trouble is left searching their conscience for the obstruction.
Forgiveness requires goodwill toward the offender, without an obligation to feel affection.
Paraphrase of Fox, appended "The Lord's Prayer," the sections on daily bread and forgiveness.
The practice
The Golden Key
Fox's Golden Key pamphlet, first published in 1931, reduces his approach to one instruction:
Stop thinking about the difficulty, whatever it is, and think about God instead.The Golden Key, paragraph beginning "As for the actual method of working"
Fox's instructions, paraphrased
Turn away from the difficulty.
Put your attention on God for at least a few moments, until the trouble is no longer occupying your mind.
Rehearse what you believe about God.
Fox suggests divine wisdom, love, presence, and power. He tells readers to return to these ideas when their attention wanders.
Leave the outcome to God.
Avoid checking whether the prayer is working or specifying the way the difficulty must be resolved.
Fox invites people of any religious views to try it. His explanation still depends on an omnipotent God acting through the person who prays. Removing God would change what Fox believes makes it work.
He promises relief from any kind of trouble, naming health, money, lawsuits, quarrels, and accidents. He says it can even make another person wiser and less troublesome. The pamphlet offers no controlled test of those claims.
Early readers
Why the book appears in AA history
Before Alcoholics Anonymous appeared in 1939, some of the fellowship's early members read Fox. AA's archives newsletter Markings, spring 2006, page 2, prints a 1954 conversation between Bill W. and Dorothy, wife of early member Clarence S. She recalls Dr. Bob giving her the book, and newcomers in the hospital receiving it as soon as they could read.
Dorothy remembers: "That was required reading for everybody." Bill confirms its popularity. The same conversation names other devotional reading, including Henry Drummond's The Greatest Thing in the World and The Upper Room. This later recollection documents early reading. It does not make Fox's book an official first AA textbook.
Fox offers a way to pray without first mastering church doctrine, insists that mistakes need not be final, and asks readers to give up resentment. This overlap does not establish that Fox wrote the Twelve Steps or supplied their wording about God. There is more of that history in the AA post.
The limits
Relief from worry does not prove dominion
Attending to a loving God may reassure a believer. Fox also asks people to stop rehearsing grievances and wishing harm on others. Finding value in those practices does not establish his explanation of what happens afterward.
Cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, works with the relation between interpretations, feelings, and behavior. But its methods include examining the evidence for a thought, solving problems, and practicing new behavior. The Beck Institute's description does not say external events are produced by thought.
The medical claim needs particular care. The National Cancer Institute reports no convincing scientific evidence that a person's attitude determines their risk of developing or dying from cancer. Emotional support can help someone cope. It cannot turn illness into evidence that they thought incorrectly, and Fox's book supplies no basis for treating prayer as a replacement for medical care.
Fox asks readers to expect help rather than surrender to despair. He means to free people from fear and guilt, yet his explanation can return the guilt in another form. If outward conditions reflect inner thought, continued suffering suggests a fault in the sufferer's consciousness, even when they cannot find it. Poverty, injury, or another person's cruelty then becomes something the victim is expected to correct from within.
In chapter 7, Fox asks readers to judge a religious teaching by its results. Elsewhere he explains failed prayer through insufficient realization, fixed forms, or resentment that remains unforgiven. Those explanations leave his promise protected: success confirms the teaching, while failure sends the reader back to their own shortcomings. The book never says when a fair trial has failed.
Sources
Texts and historical evidence
The gallery summaries and practice steps are my paraphrases. The two block quotations reproduce Fox's wording; the Gospel quotations use the King James Version. Chapters and named sections locate the passages because page numbers differ between editions. The AA recollection documents early use of the book; it cannot measure the book's effect on sobriety.
Texts, evidence, and image credits
Emmet Fox, The Sermon on the Mount. First published in 1934. Text checked in the HarperCollins digital edition (2010), including the appended The Lord's Prayer: An Interpretation, separately copyrighted in 1932. Chapter 1 supplies the claim about free will and the healing examples; chapter 2 the meekness interpretation; chapter 4 nonresistance; chapter 7 the test by results. The daily bread and forgiveness discussions are in the appendix. Internet Archive edition record · HarperOne edition and preview.
Emmet Fox, The Golden Key.Text at EmmetFox.org. Publication in 1931 is confirmed by Unity. The Golden Key for Today includes a modernized reprint and an account of Fox's Divine Science ministry. Reprints differ in wording; the quotation here follows EmmetFox.org.
The Gospel of Matthew. King James Version, chapter 5 and chapter 6. These links let you compare Fox's interpretation with the passages around it.
AA General Service Office Archives, Markings, spring 2006.Pages 2 and 3: the 1954 Bill and Dorothy recording, other early reading, and the publication of AA's book in 1939.
