III.  Finally, Christ here tells us, that thought for the morrow is contrary to all the scheme of Providence, which shows it to be vain.  ’The morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.  Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’

I interpret these two clauses as meaning this:  To-morrow has anxieties enough of its own, alter and in spite of all the anxieties about it to-day by which you try to free it from care when it comes. Every day—­every day will have its evil, have it to the end.  And every day will have evil enough to task all the strength that a man has to cope with it.  So that it just comes to this:  Anxiety,—­it is all vain.  After all your careful watching for the corner of the heaven where the cloud is to come from, there will be a cloud, and it will rise somewhere, but you never know beforehand from what quarter.  The morrow shall have its own anxieties.  After all your fortifying of the castle of your life, there will be some little postern left unguarded, some little weak place in the wall left uncommanded by a battery; and there, where you never looked for him, the inevitable invader will come in.  After all the plunging of the hero in the fabled waters that made him invulnerable, there was the little spot on the heel, and the arrow found its way there?  There is nothing certain to happen, says the proverb, but the unforeseen.  To-morrow will have its cares, spite of anything that anxiety and foreboding can do.  It is God’s law of Providence that a man shall be disciplined by sorrow; and to try to escape from that law by any forecasting prudence, is utterly hopeless, and madness.

And what does your anxiety do?  It does not empty to-morrow, brother, of its sorrows; but, ah! it empties to-day of its strength.  It does not enable you to escape the evil, it makes you unfit to cope with it when it comes.  It does not bless to-morrow, but it robs to-day.  For every day has its own burden.  Sufficient for each day is the evil which properly belongs to it.  Do not add to-morrow’s to to-day’s.  Do not drag the future into the present.  The present has enough to do with its own proper concerns.  We have always strength to bear the evil when it comes.  We have not strength to bear the foreboding of it.  ’As thy day, thy strength shall be.’  In strict proportion to the existing exigencies will be the God-given power; but if you cram and condense to-day’s sorrows by experience, and to-morrow’s sorrows by anticipation, into the narrow round of the one four-and-twenty hours, there is no promise that ’as that day thy strength shall be.’  God gives us (His name be praised!)—­God gives us power to bear all the sorrows of His making; but He does not give us power to bear the sorrows of our own making, which the anticipation of sorrow most assuredly is.