eans is that they are to find an
escape from self and self-consuming cares in service. "When you find
yourself overpowered by melancholy," said John Keble, "the best way is
to go out and do something kind to somebody or other." And thousands who
are sitting daily in the gloom of a self-created misery, with all the
blinds of the spirit drawn, if they would but "go out" and begin to care
for others, would speedily cease their miserable care for themselves.
"When I dig a man out of trouble," some one quaintly writes, "the hole
he leaves behind him is the grave in which I bury my own trouble."[47]
This is not the whole cure for care; but if the mind is to be kept from
burrowing in the dark of its own fears and anxieties, it must be set
resolutely and constantly on those nobler ends to which Christ in His
gospel summons us all.

The care-worn, Christ says, must think of others; and, most of all, they
must think of God. "Let not your heart be troubled ... believe." This is
the great argument into which all other arguments run up. This is the
larger truth, within whose wide circumference lie all Christ's words
concerning care. We are not to care because we are cared for, cared for
by God. There is, Christ teaches us, a distribution of duties between
ourselves and God. We, on our part, make it our daily business to get
God's will done on earth as it is done in heaven; He, on His, undertakes
that we shall not want.

"Make you His service your delight,
He'll make your wants His care."

Once more we see how fundamental is Christ's doctrine of the Divine
Fatherhood. It is not so much because our anxiety is useless, or because
it unfits us for service, but because God is what He is, that our worry
is at once a blunder and a sin. It is mistrust of the heavenly love that
cares for us. The sovereign cure for care is--God.

III

But now a difficulty arises. Christ's doctrine of the Divine Fatherhood
is, without doubt, fundamental; but is it true? A God who clothes the
blowing lilies with their silent beauty, without whom no sparrow falleth
to the ground, who numbers the very hairs of our head--it is a glorious
faith, if one could but receive it. But can we? It was possible once, we
think, in the childhood of the world; but that time has gone, and we are
the children of a new day, whose thoughts we cannot choose but think. So
long as men thought of our earth as the centre of the universe, it was
not difficult to believe