of the air and the lilies of the field.

The whole of these verses fall into these general thoughts: You are
obliged to trust God for your body, for its structure, for its form, for
its habitudes, and for the length of your being; you are obliged to
trust Him for the foundation--trust Him for the superstructure. You are
obliged to trust Him, whether you will or not, for the greater--trust
Him gladly for the less. You cannot help being dependent. After all your
anxiety, it is only directed to the providing of the things that are
needful for the life; the life itself, though it is a natural thing,
comes direct from God's hand; and all that you can do, with all your
carking cares, and laborious days, and sleepless nights, is but to adorn
a little more beautifully or a little less beautifully, the allotted
span--but to feed a little more delicately or a little less delicately,
the body which God has given you. What is the use of being careful for
food and raiment, when down below these necessities there lies the awful
question--for the answer to which you have to hang helpless, in
implicit, powerless dependence upon God,--Shall I live, or shall I die?
shall I have a body instinct with vitality, or a body crumbling amidst
the clods of the valley? After all your work, your anxiety gets but such
a little way down; like some passing shower of rain, that only softens
an inch of the hard-baked surface of the soil, and has no power to
fructify the seed that lies feet below the reach of its useless
moisture. Anxious care is foolish; for far beyond the region within
which your anxieties move, there is the greater region in which there
must be entire dependence upon God. 'Is not the life more than meat? Is
not the body more than raiment?' You _must_ trust Him for these;
you may as well trust Him for all the rest.

Then, again, there comes up this other thought: Not only are you
compelled to exercise unanxious dependence in regard to a matter which
you cannot influence--the life of the body--and that is the greater;
but, still further, _God gives you that_. Very well: God gives you
the greater; and God's great gifts are always inclusive of God's little
gifts. When He bestows a thing, He bestows all the consequences of the
thing as well. When He gives a life, He swears by the gift, that He will
give what is needful to sustain it. God does not stop half way in any of
His bestowments. He gives royally and liberally, honestly and
sincere