“Faithless mother!  Consider the birds of the air.  They have so much that at least they can sing!  Consider the lilies—­they were red lilies, those.  Would you not trust Him who delights in glorious colours—­more at least than you, or He would never have created them and made us to delight in them?  I do not say that your children shall be clothed in scarlet and fine linen; but if not, it is not because God despises scarlet and fine linen or does not love your children.  He loves them, I say, too much to give them everything all at once.  But He would make them such that they may have everything without being the worse, and with being the better for it.  And if you cannot trust Him yet, it begins to be a shame, I think.

“It has been well said that no man ever sank under the burden of the day.  It is when to-morrow’s burden is added to the burden of to-day, that the weight is more than a man can bear.  Never load yourselves so, my friends.  If you find yourselves so loaded, at least remember this:  it is your own doing, not God’s.  He begs you to leave the future to Him, and mind the present.  What more or what else could He do to take the burden off you?  Nothing else would do it.  Money in the bank wouldn’t do it.  He cannot do to-morrow’s business for you beforehand to save you from fear about it.  That would derange everything.  What else is there but to tell you to trust in Him, irrespective of the fact that nothing else but such trust can put our heart at peace, from the very nature of our relation to Him as well as the fact that we need these things.  We think that we come nearer to God than the lower animals do by our foresight.  But there is another side to it.  We are like to Him with whom there is no past or future, with whom a day is as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day, when we live with large bright spiritual eyes, doing our work in the great present, leaving both past and future to Him to whom they are ever present, and fearing nothing, because He is in our future, as much as He is in our past, as much as, and far more than, we can feel Him to be in our present.  Partakers thus of the divine nature, resting in that perfect All-in-all in whom our nature is eternal too, we walk without fear, full of hope and courage and strength to do His will, waiting for the endless good which He is always giving as fast as He can get us able to take it in.  Would not this be to be more of gods than Satan promised to Eve?  To live carelessly-divine, duty-doing, fearless, loving, self-forgetting lives—­is not that more than to know both good and evil—­lives in which the good, like Aaron’s rod, has swallowed up the evil, and turned it into good?  For pain and hunger are evils j but if faith in God swallows them up, do they not so turn into good?  I say they do.  And I am glad to believe that I am not alone in my parish in this conviction.  I have never been too hungry, but I have had trouble which I would gladly have exchanged for hunger and cold and weariness.  Some of you have known hunger and cold and weariness.  Do you not join with me to say:  It is well, and better than well—­whatever helps us to know the love of Him who is our God?