ance--an assurance of faith before it was a fact
certified by Revelation--'Thou wilt guide me by Thy counsel, and
afterwards receive me to glory.' The possession of Christ for our
treasure, which possession always follows on our estimating Him as such,
and desiring to have Him, that possession bears in its bosom the germ of
the assurance that, whatever befalls my physical life, I shall not be
less immortal than my treasure, and that where my heart to-day, by
aspiration and desire and faith and love, has built its nest, thither I
shall follow in His own time. They that have laid up treasure in heaven
will at last be brought to the enjoyment of the treasure that they have
laid up, and to the possession of 'the inheritance that is incorruptible
and undefiled, and that fadeth not away.'

ANXIOUS CARE

'Ye cannot serve God and Mammon. 25. Therefore I say unto you. Take
no thought for your life.'--Matt. vi. 24-25.

Foresight and foreboding are two very different things. It is not that
the one is the exaggeration of the other, but the one is opposed to the
other. The more a man looks forward in the exercise of foresight, the
less he does so in the exercise of foreboding. And the more he is
tortured by anxious thoughts about a possible future, the less clear
vision has he of a likely future, and the less power to influence it.
When Christ here, therefore, enjoins the abstinence from thought for our
life and for the future, it is not for the sake of getting away from the
pressure of a very unpleasant command that we say, He does not mean to
prevent the exercise of wise and provident foresight and preparation for
what is to come. When this English version of ours was made, the phrase
'taking thought' meant solicitous anxiety, and that is the true
rendering and proper meaning of the original. The idea is, therefore,
that here there is forbidden for a Christian, not the careful
preparation for what is likely to come, not the foresight of the storm
and taking in sail while yet there is time, but the constant occupation
and distraction of the heart with gazing forward, and fearing and being
weakened thereby; or to come back to words already used, foresight is
commanded, and, _therefore_, foreboding is forbidden. My object now
is to endeavour to gather together by their link of connection, the
whole of those precepts which follow my text to the close of the
chapter; and to try to set before you, in the order in which the