“Oh,” says the practical man at once, “that is all very fine as sentiment; it is very Eastern and poetical; but I should like to know how, in these overcrowded days, I could support myself and family if I am to trust God to feed me and them like the birds of the air, and only think about religion.”  But is not this wholly to misunderstand our Lord’s teaching?  How does God feed the birds of the air?  Is it not by incessant and untiring effort on their part?  Those who have watched a pair of birds flying backwards and forwards to the nest under the eave may well question whether industry can go further.  But in the unconscious being of a bird it is toil without [Greek:  merimna], without thought and worry, and becomes, therefore, the very picture to us of trust in a higher Power, who has thus adjusted an unerring instinct to an unfailing end.  The insect and the bird provide for the morrow, while they take no anxious thought for the morrow.  “The agility which achieves it is theirs, the skill and foresight absent from them remain with God.  And thus the simple life of lower natures, in its unconscious surrender to involuntary though internal guidance, becomes the negative type of perfect trust."[7]

But to leave his instincts and appetites to work, unimpeded and unconscious, on their own plane, while he concerns himself with matters of truly human interest, is just what man is not content to do.  On the contrary, he takes his higher and spiritual nature down into them.  He enhances their pleasure with all the powers of his imagination; he sets his intellect to work to plot and plan for their gratification; he loads them with the whole force of his spiritual will, and in so doing he overloads and maddens them.  The instinct for food and drink, which in the animal is sufficient for the maintenance of health and activity, in the man becomes gluttony and drunkenness; the instinct for the preservation of the race becomes the licentiousness which produces sterility and defeats its own ends; the instinct of self-maintenance becomes the feverish greed and money-getting which leave no room for the higher life of beauty, and science, and worship, and disinterested service.  “Seek ye first the material,” says the world, “and all these things shall be added unto you when you get the time for them”—­which will be probably never.

Now, then, do we not begin to see why the animal instincts and appetites, which make for order and happiness, and fufil their end in the animal world, lead to such intolerable disorder in the world of man?  Their laws, like all other laws in the Divine economy, are holy and just and good; but man by not observing their conditions makes them work evil and death.  Do you not see that to be a healthy animal is just what man cannot be except by being a true and high-minded man, all his conscious energies taken up and absorbed on a higher plane, with none left over to filter down into and disorder the animal instincts, which only