1886–1951 — Divine Science minister and preacher
Emmet Fox trained as an electrical engineer and ended up preaching to audiences of several thousand in New York, first at the Hippodrome and then at Carnegie Hall. He read the Gospels as a psychological instruction manual, and that reading reached far beyond New Thought — early members of Alcoholics Anonymous were handed his books as a matter of course.
Fox was born in Ireland in 1886 and raised and schooled in England, where he qualified and worked as an electrical engineer. He was drawn into New Thought circles in London, spoke at their meetings, and in 1931 moved to the United States and was ordained in Divine Science.
His New York congregation became the largest of its kind in the country. He filled the Hippodrome, then moved to Carnegie Hall to hold the crowd. He wrote throughout, died while travelling in Paris in 1951, and remains in print.
Fox's distinctive move is to treat the Gospels as operative instruction rather than history or doctrine. The Sermon on the Mount, read his way, is a set of directions for the government of consciousness: the conditions of a life follow the habitual mental state that produced them, and the Beatitudes describe states to be occupied rather than virtues to be admired.
His most-used piece is the tract called The Golden Key, a few hundred words long, whose whole instruction is to stop thinking about the trouble and think about God instead — deliberately, repeatedly, until the attention actually moves. It is closer to a mental-diet discipline than to affirmation.
Fox is the bridge between New Thought and mainstream Christian devotional reading, and his influence on early Alcoholics Anonymous is a matter of record: The Sermon on the Mount was widely read in the first groups, and he spoke to some of them.
For a reader here, he is the clearest writer on the mental diet — the discipline of refusing a line of thought — which is the least glamorous and most useful part of the whole tradition.
Stop thinking about the difficulty, whatever it is, and think about God instead.
The Golden Key, 1931
An Irish-born electrical engineer who became a Divine Science minister in New York in 1931 and drew audiences of several thousand at the Hippodrome and Carnegie Hall. He lived from 1886 to 1951 and wrote The Sermon on the Mount and The Golden Key.
A very short tract from 1931 whose entire instruction is to stop dwelling on the problem and deliberately occupy the mind with God instead, repeatedly, until the attention genuinely shifts. Fox insisted it required no belief or theology to attempt.
His writing was widely read in the earliest AA groups and he spoke to some of them. He was not a founder or a member, but The Sermon on the Mount circulated among early members as recommended reading.
His major books date from the 1930s onward and are still published commercially, so we do not host them. Quotations here are short and cited; the public-domain writers he drew on are free to read in our Source Archive.
Dates and biographical details follow the published record. Quotations are reproduced verbatim from the editions named beside them; where we host the text in full, the citation links to it.