s goodness upon them: He is your Father, and He will not
forget His child. They cannot trust: you can. They might be anxious, if
they could look forward, for they know not the hand that feeds them; but
you can turn round, and recognise the source of all blessings. So,
doubly ought you to be guarded from care by the lesson of that free
joyful Nature that lies round about you, and to say, 'I have no fear of
famine, nor of poverty, nor of want; for He feedeth the ravens when they
cry. There is no reason for distrust. Shame on me if I am anxious, for
every lily of the field blows its beauty, and every bird of the air
carols its song without sorrowful foreboding, and yet there is no
Father in heaven to them!'

And the last Inferiority is this; 'To-day it is, and to-morrow it is
cast into the oven.' Their little life is thus blessed and brightened.
Oh, how much greater will be the mercies that belong to them who have a
longer life upon earth, and who never die! The lesson is not--These are
the plebeians in God's universe, and you are the aristocracy, and you
may trust Him; but it is--They, by their inferior place, have lesser and
lower wants, wants but for a bounded being, wants that stretch not
beyond earthly existence, and that for a brief span. They are blessed in
the present, for the oven to-morrow saddens not the blossoming to-day.
You have nobler necessities and higher longings, wants that belong to a
soul that never dies, to a nature which may glow with the consciousness
that God is your Father, wants which 'look before and after,' therefore,
you are 'better than they'; and 'shall He not much more clothe you, O ye
of little faith?'

II. And now, in the second place, there is here another general line of
considerations tending to dispel all anxious care--the thought that it
is contrary to all the lessons of Religion, or Revelation, which show it
to be heathenish.

There are three clauses devoted to the illustration of this thought:
'After all these things do the Gentiles seek'; 'your heavenly Father
knoweth that ye have need of all these things'; 'seek ye first the
kingdom of God, and His righteousness, and all these things shall be
added unto you.'

The first clause contains the principle, that solicitude for the future
is at bottom heathen worldly-mindedness. The heathen tendency in us all
leads to an overestimate of material good, and it is a question of
circumstances whether that shall show itself in heaping up