we have no time to think about Christ. " The cares of this world choke the word," and the Speaker of the word is forgotten. Yes, we may entertain so many cares that the Lord cannot get in at the door. And yet all the time the gracious promise is waiting : Cast all your care on Him, for He careth for you.
And what, then, is the cure for worry ? Can you ask ? If you will but make room for Him in your heart and keep Him there, your worry will vanish, even as in the Pilgrim's Progress Christian's load fell off when he lifted his eyes to the Cross of Christ. With Him there to share every thought, you will find that many of the difficulties will smooth themselves out forthwith ; and as you learn to leave in His hands the things which are His business, not yours, so will all worry become by His grace a thing of the past.
H Doubtless your cross was chosen for you by our Lord and Master just for its weight. To me there is always a wonderful beauty and consolation in the fact, so simply told in the narrative of the Passion, that His cross proved too heavy for Him. He has never since that hour suffered any one of His own to bear a cross unaided, nor yet too heavy .^
(3) Our pleasures keep Christ out of our lives. A merely V sensational life can make us numb to all that is spiritual ; and the unseen world becomes non-existent to our souls. That is an awful law of life. We may so dwell in the pleasures of the senses that all the deeper things are as though they were dead, and buried in forgotten graves.
One would certainly think that the Lord of glory could not be crowded out of a wedding, that solemn and sacred experience in human life. But He can ! Of course we may mention His name, but the naming is too often only a conventional courtesy,
^ E. M. Goulburn, The Pursuit of Holiness, 281.
2 Archbishop Magee, in Life by J. C. Macdonnell, i. 268.
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20 NO ROOM
while the Lord Himself is relegated to the yard. We may be engrossed with the sensations of the event, with the glittering externals, with the dresses and the orange-blossoms, while the holy Christ, upon whom the lasting joy and peace and blessed- ness of the wedded pair will utterly depend, is absolutely forgotten.
(4) And again, there are those who have no room for Him because of their sin : and this is the most real and all-pervading obstacle of all. A sinful habit, using the word in its largest sense, of pride or envy, covetousness or gluttony, and not only of particular sinful acts, is by far the worst obstacle to keep the Saviour out, and that because it at once deadens and deceives us. Far be it from me, for instance, to deny that doubts are sometimes purely intellectual ; but I say deliberately that I have rarely talked with a man, or a woman either, about religious doubts without finding, when they come to speak quite freely, that the difficulty was, in part at any rate, a moral one. When I look into my own heart, I see the same thing ; my own doubts have been based on moral difficulties far more largely than I was willing to admit to myself at the time, or even than I knew at the time ; and I believe that most of us would have to make the same confession.^
^ Christ's crowding-out power is tremendous. That explains why He is so crowded out. When allowed freely in He crowds everything out that would crowd Him out. He crowds out sin. By the blood drawn from His own side He washes it out. By the soft-burning but intense fire of His heart He burns it out. By the purity of His own wondrous presence, recognized as Lord, He reveals its horrid ugliness, and compels us, by the holy compulsion of love, to keep it out.^
There fared a mother driven forth
Out of an inn to roam ;
In the place where she was homeless
All men are at home.
The crazy stable close at hand.
With shaking timber and shifting sand,
Grew a stronger thing to abide and stand
Than the square stones of Eome.
^ W. E. Collins, Hours of Insight, 121. 2 S. D. Gordon, The Crowded Inn, 58.
ST. LUKE II. 7 21
For men are homesick in their homes,
And strangers under the sun,
And they lay their heads in a foreign land
Whenever the day is done.
Here we have battle and blazing eyes,
And chance and honour and high surprise,
But our homes are under miraculous skies
Where the Yule tale was begun.
A Child in a foul stable,
Where the beasts feed and foam,
Only where He was homeless
Are you and I at home:
We have hands that fashion and heads that know,
But our hearts we lost— how long ago !
In a place no chart nor ship can show
Under the sky's dome.
This world is wild as an old wives' tale.
And strange the plain things are.
The earth is enough and the air is enough