I
I PETER V. 7 137
birds of care have built their nests, and where little can be heard but their importunate croakings.^
2. But let us distinguish. There is a proper care, a care that is praiseworthy. The best Christians see that life is scarcely possible and certainly is not useful without some amount of pains. In fact, the chief difference between the man whose life is a noble Christian benefaction and the man whose life is a miserable heathenish failure is that the one is careful and the other is care- less. In this sense, care means the diligent use of our faculties. It is the scrupulous discharge of every trust by the good steward and soldier of Jesus Christ. It gathers up the fragments that nothing may be lost. It creates industry, economy, tidiness, the maintenance of families, integrity; and these are all Christian virtues. Any lack of them dishonours God. Disorder, unthrift, uncleanliness, waste, in any house, are vices ; and they all follow from carelessness. No amount of religious sentiment will justify them. Care in this sense is what distinguishes the household of a Christian family from the cabin of a barbarian. All growth in goodness, victory over temptation, conversion of bad habits, every kind of human excellence, comes by painstaking ; that is, by care. A negligent or improvident Christian is a blemish in the Body of Christ, which ought to be without spot or wrinkle, clean and whole.
^ You are living not only where you are, but away in another land where your boy is, and you cannot help thinking of the un- known dangers and temptations which may assail him ; you feel them lurking like shadows in the corner, threatening you because they concern him. And that is not fault ; it is life, it is love, it is motherhood. And the knowledge that you do thus care, and that his disgrace would strike you like a wound, is one of the powers which keep him back from evil. We have other relations within the narrower and wider communities in which our life has grown, but in them all the same assertion holds ; and he who takes his place in Church, or town, or nation, lazily, caring only for what affects himself, and unconcerned by any public danger, is rightly marked for men's contempt. He is not half a man ; for a man lives in his community ; sharing its burdens, rejoicing in its successes, putting life and thought at its disposal for ends beyond his own advantage. That is how men are made, and it
^ "W. Robertson Nicoll, Ten-Minute Sermons, 27.
138 HUMAN ANXIETY AND DIVINE CARE
is also how the stiff world is driven forward along ways of pro- gress. For care is one of God's chief disciplines in fashioning the character of men.^
3. There is also an improper care — the anxiety of the text. It clings to us as a creature of this world clings to this world. It hinders the affections when they try to rise heavenward, and drags them back. It doubts whether Christ is still near at hand and His grace sufficient. It reads the glorious promises of the Gospel with an absent mind, like some unreal legend. It murmurs fret- fully, " No trial is like my trial ; other troubles I could bear ; this has no explanation, no profit, and turns no side of it to the sun." It grinds at every kind of work it undertakes as in a treadmill, under a taskmaster, rejoicing in no liberty, animated with no hope. All crosses are compulsory. Some cares shoot through us like shocks of neuralgic pain, making us quiver and tremble, as when great griefs concentrate their torture upon us. Other cares press with silent, leaden weights, like the dull aching of the head that drains vigour, drop by drop, out of the brain and all the drooping dependencies of nerve and limbs. The forms of the burden vary. But the heaviness of them all is the heart's distance from God. The sun is hid. There is no wide horizon, no light springing of the will, no joy to break the bondage of the law. This is earthly care, unprofitable, unreasonable, unholy care — the care that wears out men and women before their time, the care that sours and saddens God's world, the care that slowly kills the body under the name of a thousand different diseases, and is the beginning of death to the spirit. It is the care you can not, only because you will not, cast upon Him who careth for you.
^ Brought up in the school of Presbyterian Moderatism, her [Professor Sellar's mother] piety was cheerful, humble, and re- served, and drew its strength from certain chapters of the New Testament, and its emotion from the beloved Scottish Paraphrases. These we read to her the last thing before she was left for the night, but if her maid happened to come into the room at the time, she would motion to the reader to stop, and make anxious inquiries if there were " rizzered " haddocks and other essentials for the gentlemen's breakfast. Then with a little apologetic sign
1 W. M. Macgregor, Some of God's Ministries, 247.
I PETER V. 7 139
she would say, " * Let not your hearts with anxious thoughts be troubled or dismayed ' — but I wish I were sure that my sons were quite comfortable ! " ^