If this be so, you need the Help none ever seek in vain more than those to whom varied and exciting scenes are alloted.

The angel of death who had said upon entering the plague-stricken city that he meant to kill ten thousand people, was accused on the way out of having slain forty thousand.

“I kept my word,” he answered.  “I killed but ten thousand.  Fear killed the rest!”

If work slays thousands of American women, American worry slays her tens of thousands.  Work may bend the back and stiffen the joints.  It ploughs no furrows in brow and cheek; it does not hollow the eyes and drag all the facial muscles downward.  These are misdeeds of worry—­your familiar demon, and the curse of our sex everywhere.  A good man—­who, by the way, had a pale, harassed-looking wife—­once told me that on each birthday and New Year’s he retired to his study and spent some time behind the locked door in making good resolutions for the coming year.

“I may not keep them all,” he said, ingenuously, “but the exercise of forming them is edifying.”

With the thought of his wan and worried wife in mind, I shocked him by declining for my part to undertake such a big contract as resolutions for a year, a month or a week.  If I live to a good old age, I shall owe the blessing in a great measure to the discovery, years ago, that I am hired not by the job, but by the day.  If you, dear friend, will receive this truth into a good and honest heart, and believing, abide in and live by it, you will find it the very elixir of life to your spirit.

Come down from the pillar of observation.  You might enact Simeon Stylites there for twenty years to come and be none the wiser or happier for the outlook.  Refuse obstinately to take the big contract.  Let each morning and evening be a new and complete day.  In childlike simplicity live as if you were to have no to-morrow so far as worrying as to its possible outcome goes.  Make the best of to-day’s income.  Not one minute of to-morrow belongs to you.  It is all God’s.  Thank him that His hands hold it, and not your feeble, uncertain fingers.

Longfellow wrote nothing more elevating and helpful than his sonnet to “To-morrow, the Mysterious Guest,” who whispers to the boding human soul: 

         “’Remember Barmecide,
And tremble to be happy with the rest.’ 
  And I make answer, ’I am satisfied. 
I know not, ask not, what is best;
  God hath already said what shall betide.’”

The new version of the New Testament, among other richly suggestive readings, tells us that Martha was “distracted with much serving,” and that we are not to be “anxious for the morrow; for the morrow will be anxious for itself.”  That is, it will bring its own proper load of labor and of care, from which you have no right to borrow for to-day’s uses; which you cannot diminish by the same process.

George MacDonald puts this great principle aptly: