uld
proceed at once to deal with the cause. If that were not removed, a
doctor might prescribe a hundred things, and all might be taken in
turn, without producing the least effect. Things are so arranged in
the original planning of the world that certain effects must follow
certain causes, and certain causes must be abolished before certain
effects can be removed. Certain parts of Africa are inseparably linked
with the physical experience called fever; this fever is in turn
infallibly linked with a mental experience called restlessness and
delirium. To abolish the mental experience the radical method would be
to abolish the physical experience, and the way of abolishing the
physical experience would be to abolish Africa, or to cease to go
there.

Now this holds good for all other forms of Restlessness. Every other
form and kind of Restlessness in the world has a definite cause, and
the particular kind of Restlessness can only be removed by removing
the allotted cause.

All this is also true of Rest. Restlessness has a cause: must not
_Rest_ have a cause? Necessarily. If it were a chance world we would
not expect this; but, being a methodical world, it cannot be
otherwise. Rest, physical rest, moral rest, spiritual rest, every kind
of rest has a cause, as certainly as restlessness. Now causes are
discriminating. There is one kind of cause for every particular effect
and no other, and if one particular effect is desired, the
corresponding cause must be set in motion. It is no use proposing
finely devised schemes, or going through general pious exercises in
the hope that somehow Rest will come. The Christian life is not
casual, but causal. All nature is a standing protest against the
absurdity of expecting to secure spiritual effects, or any effects,
without the employment of appropriate causes. The Great Teacher dealt
what ought to have been the final blow to this infinite irrelevancy by
a single question, "Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of
thistles?"

Why, then, did the Great Teacher not educate His followers fully? Why
did He not tell us, for example, how such a thing as Rest might be
obtained? The answer is that _He did_. But plainly, explicitly, in so
many words? Yes, plainly, explicitly, in so many words. He assigned
Rest to its cause, in words with which each of us has been familiar
from his earliest childhood.

He begins, you remember--for you at once know the passage I refer
to--almost as if Rest co