more may we, whom God has blessed with the power of work, and gifted with force to mould the future, be sure that He will bless the exercise of the prerogative by which He exalts us above inferior creatures, and makes us capable of toil.  You can influence to-morrow.  What you can influence by work, fret not about, for you can work.  What you cannot influence by work, fret not about, for it is vain.  ‘They toil not, neither do they spin.’  You are lifted above them because God has given you hands that can grasp the tool or the pen.  Man’s crown of glory, as well as man’s curse and punishment, is, ’In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread.’  So learn what you have to do with that great power of anticipation.  It is meant to be the guide of wise work.  It is meant to be the support for far-reaching, strenuous action.  It is meant to elevate us above mere living from hand to mouth; to ennoble our whole being by leading to and directing toil that is blessed because there is no anxiety in it, labour that will be successful since it is according to the will of that God who has endowed us with the power of putting it forth.

Then there comes another inferiority.  ’Your heavenly Father feedeth them.’  They cannot say ‘Father!’ and yet they are fed.  You are above them by the prerogative of toil.  You are above them by the nearer relation which you sustain to your Father in heaven.  He is their Maker, and lavishes His goodness upon them:  He is your Father, and He will not forget His child.  They cannot trust:  you can.  They might be anxious, if they could look forward, for they know not the hand that feeds them; but you can turn round, and recognise the source of all blessings.  So, doubly ought you to be guarded from care by the lesson of that free joyful Nature that lies round about you, and to say, ’I have no fear of famine, nor of poverty, nor of want; for He feedeth the ravens when they cry.  There is no reason for distrust.  Shame on me if I am anxious, for every lily of the field blows its beauty, and every bird of the air carols its song without sorrowful foreboding, and yet there is no Father in heaven to them!’

And the last Inferiority is this; ’To-day it is, and to-morrow it is cast into the oven.’  Their little life is thus blessed and brightened.  Oh, how much greater will be the mercies that belong to them who have a longer life upon earth, and who never die!  The lesson is not—­These are the plebeians in God’s universe, and you are the aristocracy, and you may trust Him; but it is—­They, by their inferior place, have lesser and lower wants, wants but for a bounded being, wants that stretch not beyond earthly existence, and that for a brief span.  They are blessed in the present, for the oven to-morrow saddens not the blossoming to-day.  You have nobler necessities and higher longings, wants that belong to a soul that never dies, to a nature which may glow with the consciousness that God is your Father, wants which ‘look before and after,’ therefore, you are ‘better than they’; and ’shall He not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?’