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.