^ Anxiety has no place in the life of one of God's children. Christ's serenity was one of the most unmistakable signs of His filial trust. He was tired and hungry and thirsty and in pain ; but we cannot imagine Him anxious or fretful. His mind was kept in perfect peace because it was stayed on God. The life lived by the faith of the Son of God will find His word kept : " My peace I give unto you." ^
^ -t. D, Babcock, Thoughts for Every -Day Living, 7.
428 THE ANTIDOTE TO ANXIETY
^ I desire to submit myself entirely to the will of God, and moreover that He would sanctify this trial both to me and mine. On coming to Brechin, I was led, through my youngest boy's behaviour, to see what a blessed thing it is to receive the kingdom of God " as a little child." My little fellow, about four years old, whom I brought with me, gave himself no trouble amid the boats, omnibuses, and railway coaches, on sea, land, and in dark tunnels : his father was at his side, and never a care, or fear, or doubt, or anxiety had he. May we have grace to be led by the hand, and trust to the care and kindness of a reconciled God and Father!!
3. Tlie cause of anxiety. — The cause ^j^jiixiety is distrust of God. Faith in God and a soul nvp-vwhplTnftrl wit.h Tnisgivij^crs come pretty near being mutually exclusive. At any rate a heart filled with the worry which narrows our spiritual horizons, and turns the sweet light of the stars into horrible darkness, has small place in it for any living and sustaining confidence in Him who ' notes the fall of a sparrow, and who has assured us that He is ready to take upon His own heart all our burdens of care. God has not promised to do everything for us ; there are some things we must do for ourselves. But He has promised never to leave or forsake His own. He has promised to save unto the utter- most all who come to Him through Jesus Christ. He has promised that all things shall work together for good to them that love Him. Our necessities, our straitnesses, our wants, our natural burdens, are not surprises to God. He understands them all, feels them all. But in the midst of them all, and with reference to them all. He wishes us to trust Him.
^ Froude's religion, so far as it depended upon his conception of God, was a religion of almost unmixed fear. So far as it was of something better, it was purified, first, by a love and admira- tion for " the holy men of old," such as the founders of the Oxford Colleges, in whose steps, after his election to his Fellow- ship, he aspired to tread ; secondly, by his affection for Keble, for whom, in the prayer written at the same time, he thanks God, as one who had convinced him of the error of his ways, and in whose presence he tasted happiness ; but above all, by his devotion to his mother, in whose recollection he found a consciousness of that blessedness which he had been taught to look for in the presence of Saints and Angels. These were feelings which were
' Thomas Guthrie,
PHILIPPIANS IV. 6 429
better than his religion, and which, if they could have developed and grown with the latter, might have delivered it from fears, and have converted it into a source of peace as well as of activity : but whether from the irremediable taint of the past, or owing to influence that proved too strong for Keble's, this growth did not go on.i
^ Missing the Infinite, man grasps the finite good, clings passionately to it, and struggles with a melancholy earnestuess to become his own Providence. But with faith in God — the belief that He has not launched a world into existence from which thereafter He sits remote, merely watching it, or now and then interfering to help a stumbling creature when it calls ; the belief that He remains within His own creation, as its inmost and essential life ; the great Sustainer, in whom it lives and moves, and has its being — with this faith, I say, the heart of the creature who is also a child, may well disburden itself of care. It is careful for nothing, simply because it believes that God is careful for everything ; that His tender mercies are over all His works ; and that the laws by which He governs the world are but the expressions of His living will, the signs of His immediate agency ; not the handiwork of a retired Artificer, but the mani- festation of an ever present God.^
^ The crosses which we make for ourselves by over-anxiety as to the future are not heaven-sent crosses. We tempt God by our false wisdom, seeking to forestall His arrangements, and struggling to supplement His Providence by our own provisions. The fruit of our wisdom is always bitter. God suffers it to be so, that we may be discomfited when we forsake His Fatherly guidance. The future is not ours : we may never have a future ; or, if it comes, it may be wholly different from all we foresaw. Ivct us shut our eyes to that which God hides from us in the Iiidden depths of His wisdom. Let us worship without seeing; let us be silent, and lie still. The crosses actually laid upon us always bring their own special grace and consequent comfort with them ; we see the hand of God when it is laid upon us. But the crosses wrought by anxious forebodings are altogether ^yond God's dispensations; we meet them without the special grace adapted to the need — nay, rather in a faithless spirit, which precludes grace; and so everything seems hard and unendurable. " Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof," our Lord has said ; and the evil of each day becomes good if we leave it to God.^