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.”