-day, when the real temptation comes to-morrow we shall not have laid
hold of the grace that was offered, and so cannot but fail, unless some
extraordinary mercy of God saves us then in spite of our faithlessness.

Nor should we ever permit ourselves to forget that there may be no
to-morrow. "Remember that it is God's, not thine."[16] How sad a case
would it be (and doubtless there have been many such), if we should
weaken our souls and God's power within them, by fretting over what
might happen to-morrow; then, the call suddenly coming, find ourselves
saved indeed perhaps, but occupying a lower place in heaven forever,
because in troubling our hearts over the burdens of a to-morrow that
never came we lost the {73} grace of to-day. Every grace given us here
is transmuted into glory there. Let us not lose one of them, for the
graces proffered and accepted here are pledges of the measure of the
heavenly glory that will be ours.[17]

IV. _God's Sympathy_

But, do what we will, after all, the best and only unfailing refuge
from the snare of a false solicitude is to turn in these anxious
moments to Him with Whom alone true sympathy is found. With profit may
we hearken to the warning of the blessed a Kempis: "By mutual speech we
seek mutual comfort, and desire to ease the heart overwearied with
manifold anxieties..... But, alas, often in vain and to no end; for
this outward comfort is no small loss of inward and divine
consolation."[18]

In our solicitude we desire, and rightly desire, human sympathy, and
God means us to have it. It was for this very thing that He sent His
Son to take our nature and a human heart, full of warm love and
sympathy, that we might find in perfection that for which we
yearn,--the tender sympathy of our own kind. What sweet and {74}
strong consideration for our weakness is shown in this. Mere human
sympathy only enervates, and in the end the soul is left weaker than
before. Every man's experience has told him this, and yet deep in the
human heart there is that uncontrollable longing for the loving touch
of another heart, human like our own. God sees this, and condescends
to it. He takes humanity, full and complete, up into the Godhead, that
in Him we may find that human Heart that will give us perfectly the
comfort and sympathy for which we yearn.

So in our solicitude let us turn to Him, our Elder Brother, and the
disciple who lay on His breast at Supper will have no more loving