Let us listen, then, to Christ's gracious argument and wise
remonstrances. What, He asks, is the good of our anxiety? What can it do
for us? "Which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto his
stature? If, then, ye are not able to do that which is least, why are ye
anxious concerning the rest?" "But, the morrow! the morrow!" we cry.
"Let the morrow," Christ answers, "take care of itself; sufficient unto
the day is the evil thereof; learn thou to live a day at a time." "Our
earliest duty," says a great writer of our day, "is to cultivate the
habit of not looking round the corner;" which is but another version of
Christ's simple precept. And the saying, simple and obvious as it may
seem, never fails to justify itself. For one thing, the morrow rarely
turns out as our fears imagined it. Our very anxiety blurs our vision,
and throws our judgment out of focus. We see things through an
atmosphere which both magnifies and distorts. We remember how it was
with Mr. Fearing: "When he was come to the entrance of the Valley of the
Shadow of Death, I thought"--it is Greatheart who tells the story--"I
should have lost my man: not for that he had any inclination to go
back,--that he always abhorred; but he was ready to die for fear. Oh,
the hobgoblins will have me! the hobgoblins will have me! cried he; and
I could not beat him out on't." Yet see how matters fell out. "This I
took very great notice of," goes on Greatheart, "that this valley was as
quiet while he went through it as ever I knew it before or since." And
again, when Mr. Fearing "was come at the river where was no bridge,
there again he was in a heavy case. Now, now, he said, he should be
drowned for ever, and so never see that face with comfort, that he had
come so many miles to behold." But once more his fears were put to
shame: "Here, also, I took notice of what was very remarkable: the water
of that river was lower at this time than ever I saw it in all my life.
So he went over at last, not much above wet-shod."
And even though the morrow should prove as bad as our fears, Christ's
precept is still justified, for the worst kind of preparation for such a
day is worry. Worry, like the undue clatter of machinery, means waste,
waste of power. Anxiety, it has been well said, does not empty to-morrow
of its sorrows, but it does empty to-day of its strength. Therefore, let
us not be anxious. Let us climb our hills when we come to them. God
gives each day strength for the day; but when, to the responsibilities
of to-day we add the burdens of to-morrow, and try to do the work of two
days in the strength of one, we are making straight paths for the feet
of failure and disappointment. All the many voices of reason and
experience are on Christ's side when He bids us, "Be not anxious."
Yet, true as all this is, how inadequate it is! When the tides of care
are at the flood they will overrun and submerge all such counsels as
these, as the waves wash away the little sand-hills which children build
by the sea-shore. "We know it is no good to worry," people will tell us,
half-petulantly, when we remonstrate with them; "but we cannot help
ourselves, and if you have no more to say to us than this, you cannot
help us either." And they are right. Care is the cancer of the heart,
and if our words can go no deeper than they have yet gone, it can never
be cured. It is an inward spiritual derangement, which calls for
something more than little bits of good advice in order to put it right.
And if, again, we turn to the words of Jesus, we shall find the needed
something more is given. The care-worn soul, for its cure, must be taken
out of itself. "Oh the bliss of waking," says some one, "with all one's
thoughts turned outward!" It is the power to do that, to turn, and to
keep turned, one's thoughts outwards that the care-ridden need; and
Christ will show us how it may be ours.
"Be not anxious," says Jesus; and then side by side with this negative
precept He lays this positive one: "Seek ye first the kingdom of God."
Christ came to establish a kingdom in which "all men's good" should be
"each man's rule," and love the universal law. When, therefore, He bids
the anxious seek the kingdom, what He means is that they are to find an
escape from self and self-consuming cares in service. "When you find
yourself overpowered by melancholy," said John Keble, "the best way is
to go out and do something kind to somebody or other." And thousands who
are sitting daily in the gloom of a self-created misery, with all the
blinds of the spirit drawn, if they would but "go out" and begin to care
for others, would speedily cease their miserable care for themselves.
"When I dig a man out of trouble," some one quaintly writes, "the hole
he leaves behind him is the grave in which I bury my own trouble."[47]
This is not the whole cure for care; but if the mind is to be kept from
burrowing in the dark of its own fears and anxieties, it must be set
resolutely and constantly on those nobler ends to which Christ in His
gospel summons us all.
The care-worn, Christ says, must think of others; and, most of all, they
must think of God. "Let not your heart be troubled ... believe." This is
the great argument into which all other arguments run up. This is the
larger truth, within whose wide circumference lie all Christ's words
concerning care. We are not to care because we are cared for, cared for
by God. There is, Christ teaches us, a distribution of duties between
ourselves and God. We, on our part, make it our daily business to get
God's will done on earth as it is done in heaven; He, on His, undertakes
that we shall not want.
"Make you His service your delight,
He'll make your wants His care."
Once more we see how fundamental is Christ's doctrine of the Divine
Fatherhood. It is not so much because our anxiety is useless, or because
it unfits us for service, but because God is what He is, that our worry
is at once a blunder and a sin. It is mistrust of the heavenly love that
cares for us. The sovereign cure for care is--God.