II.  And now, in the second place, there is here another general line of considerations tending to dispel all anxious care—­the thought that it is contrary to all the lessons of Religion, or Revelation, which show it to be heathenish.

There are three clauses devoted to the illustration of this thought:  ‘After all these things do the Gentiles seek’; ’your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things’; ’seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you.’

The first clause contains the principle, that solicitude for the future is at bottom heathen worldly-mindedness.  The heathen tendency in us all leads to an overestimate of material good, and it is a question of circumstances whether that shall show itself in heaping up earthly treasures, or in anxious care.  These are the same plant, only the one is growing in the tropics of sunny prosperity, and the other in the arctic zone of chill penury.  The one is the sin of the worldly-minded rich man, the other is the sin of the worldly-minded poor man.  The character is the same in both, turned inside out!  And, therefore, the words, ’ye cannot serve God and Mammon,’ stand in this chapter in the centre between our Lord’s warning against laying up treasures on earth, and His warning against being full of cares for earth.  He would show us thereby that these two apparently opposite states of mind in reality spring from that one root, and are equally, though differently, ‘serving Mammon.’  We do not sufficiently reflect upon that.  We say, perhaps, this intense solicitude of ours is a matter of temperament, or of circumstances.  So it may be:  but the Gospel was sent to help us to cure worldly temperaments, and to master circumstances.  But the reason why we are troubled and careful about the things of this life lies here, that our hearts have taken an earthly direction, that we are at bottom heathenish in our lives and in our desires.  It is the very characteristic of the Gentile (that is to say, of the heathen) that earth should bound his horizon.  It is the very characteristic of the worldly man that all his anxieties on the one hand, and all his joys on the other, should be ‘cribbed, cabined and confined’ within the narrow sphere of the visible.  When a Christian is living in the foreboding of some earthly sorrow coming down upon him, and is feeling as if there would be nothing left if some earthly treasure were swept away, is that not, in the very root of it, idolatry—­worldly-mindedness?  Is it not clean contrary to all our profession that for us ’there is none upon earth that we desire besides Thee’?  Anxious care rests upon a basis of heathen worldly-mindedness.