We must first consider carefully what this text really means; what ‘taking no thought for the morrow’ really is.  Now, it cannot mean that we are to be altogether careless and imprudent; for all Scripture, and especially Solomon’s Proverbs, give us the very opposite advice, and one part of God’s Word cannot contradict the other.  The whole of Solomon’s Proverbs is made up of lessons in prudence and foresight; and surely our Lord did not come to do away with Solomon’s Proverbs, but to fulfil them.  And more, Solomon declares again and again, that prudence and foresight are the gifts of God; and God’s gifts are surely meant to be used.  Isaiah, too, tells us that the common work of the farm, tilling the ground, sowing, and reaping, were taught to men by God; and says of the ploughman, that ’His God doth instruct him to discretion and doth teach him.’  Neither can God mean us to sit idle with folded hands waiting to be fed by miracles.  Would He have given to man reason, and skill, and the power of bettering his mortal condition by ten thousand instructions if He had not meant him to use those gifts?  We find that, at the beginning, Adam is put into the garden, not to sit idle in it, nor to feed merely on the fruits which fall from the trees, as the dumb animals do, but to dress it, and to keep it; to use his own reason to improve his own condition, and the land on which God had placed him.  Was not the very first command given to man to replenish the earth and subdue it?  And do we not find in the very end of Scripture the Apostles working with their own hands for their daily bread?

But what use of many words?  It is absurd to believe anything else; absurd to believe that man was meant to live like the butterfly, flitting without care from flower to flower, and, like the butterfly, die helpless at the first shower or the first winter’s frost.  Whatever the text means, it cannot mean that.

And it does not mean that.  I suppose, that three hundred years ago (when the Bible was translated out of the Greek tongue, in which the Apostles wrote, into English), ‘taking thought’ meant something different from what it does now:  but the plain meaning of the text, if it be put into such English as we talk now, is, ’Do not fret about the morrow.  Be not anxious about the morrow.’  There is no doubt at all, as any scholar can tell you, that that is the plain meaning of the word in our modern English, and that our Lord is not telling us to be imprudent or idle, but not to be anxious and fretful about the morrow.

And more, I think if we look carefully at these words, we shall find that they tell us the very reason why we are to work, and to look forward, and to believe that God will bless our labour.