This fruitlessness of toil is inevitable unless it springs from a motive which in itself is sufficient, pursues a purpose which will surely be accomplished, and is done in hope of the world where ’our works do follow us.’  If we are allied to Christ, then whether our work be great or small, apparently successful or frustrated, it will be all right.  Though we do not see our fruit, we know that He will bless the springing thereof, and that no least deed done for Him but shall in the harvest-day be found waving a nodding head of multiplied results.  ’God giveth it a body as it hath pleased Him’; and ’he that goeth forth weeping shall doubtless return, bringing his sheaves with him.’  ’Your labour is not in vain to the Lord.’

II.  A godless life is one of unsatisfied hunger and thirst.

The poor results of the exiles’ toil did not avail to stay gnawing hunger nor slake burning thirst, and the same result applies only too sadly to lives lived apart from God.  There are a multitude of desires proper to the human soul besides those which belong to the bodily frame, and these have their proper objects.  Is it true that the objects are sufficient to satisfy the desires?  Does any one of the things for which we toil feed us full when we have it?  Do we not always want just a little more?  And is not that want accompanied with a real and sharp sense of hunger?  Is it not true the appetite GROWS with what it feeds on?  And even if a man schools himself to something like content, it comes not because the desire is satisfied, but because it is somehow bridled.  Cerberus often breaks his chain, in spite of honied cakes that have been tossed into the wide mouths of his tripled heads.  What do wealth and ambition do for their votaries?  And even he who thirsts for nobler occupations and lives for higher aims is often obliged to admit, in weariness, that ‘this also is vanity.’

But even when the desire is satisfied, the man desiring is not.  To feed their bodies men starve their souls.  How many longings are crushed or neglected by him who pushes eagerly after any one longing!  We have either to race from one course to another, splitting life into intolerable distractions, or we have to circumscribe and limit ourselves in order to devote all our power to securing one; and if we secure it, then a hundred others will bark like a kennel of hounds.

And if you say, ’I know nothing about all this; I have my aims, and on the whole I secure a tolerable satisfaction for them,’ do you not know a nameless unrest?  If you do not, then you are so much the poorer and the lower, and you have murdered part of yourself.  Some one single tyrannous desire sits solitary in your heart.  He has slain all his brethren that he may rule, as sultans used to do in Constantinople.  One big fish in the aquarium has eaten up all the others.