er; but if you cram and condense to-day's sorrows by
experience, and to-morrow's sorrows by anticipation, into the narrow
round of the one four-and-twenty hours, there is no promise that 'as
_that_ day thy strength shall be.' God gives us (His name be
praised!)--God gives us power to bear all the sorrows of His making; but
He does not give us power to bear the sorrows of our own making, which
the anticipation of sorrow most assuredly is.

Then: contrary to the lessons of Nature, contrary to the teachings of
Religion, contrary to the scheme of Providence; weakening your strength,
distracting your mind, sucking the sunshine out of every landscape, and
casting a shadow over all the beauty--the curse of our lives is that
heathenish, blind, useless, faithless, needless anxiety in which we do
indulge. Look forward, my brother, for God has given you that royal and
wonderful gift of dwelling in the future, and bringing all its glories
around your present. Look forward, not for life, but for heaven; not for
food and raiment, but for the righteousness after which it is blessed to
hunger and thirst, and wherewith it is blessed to be clothed. Not for
earth, but for heaven, let your forecasting gift of prophecy come into
play. Fill the present with quiet faith, with patient waiting, with
honest work, with wise reading of God's lessons of nature, of
providence, and of grace, all of which say to us, Live in God's future,
that the present may be bright: work in the present, that the future may
be certain! _They_ may well look around in expectation, sunny and
unclouded, of a blessed time to come, whose hearts are already 'fixed,
trusting in the Lord.' He to whom there are a present Christ, and a
present Spirit, and a present Father, and a present forgiveness, and a
present redemption, may well live expatiating in all the glorious
distance of the unknown to come, sending out (if I may use such a
figure) from his placid heart over all the weltering waters of this
lower world, the peaceful seeking dove, his meek hope, that shall come
back again from its flight with some palm-branch broken from the trees
of Paradise between its bill. And he that has no such present has a
future dark, chaotic, a heaving, destructive ocean; and over it there
goes for ever--black-pinioned, winging its solitary and hopeless
flight--the raven of his anxious thoughts, which finds no place to rest,
and comes back again to the desolate ark with its foreboding croak