The care that is filling your mind at this moment, or but waiting till you lay the book aside to leap upon you—that need which is no need, is a demon sucking at the spring of your life.
“No; mine is a reasonable care—an unavoidable care, indeed!”
“Is it something you have to do this very moment?”
“No.”
“Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something that is required of you this moment!”
“There is nothing required of me at this moment.”
“Nay, but there is—the greatest thing that can be required of man.”
“Pray, what is it?”
“Trust in the living God. His will is your life.”
“He may not will I should have what I need!”
“Then you only think you need it. Is it a good thing?”
“Yes, it is a good thing.”
“Then why doubt you shall have it?”
“Because God may choose to have me go without it.”
“Why should he?”
“I cannot tell.”
“Must it not be in order to give you something instead?”
“I want nothing instead.”
“I thought I was talking to a Christian!”
“I can consent to be called nothing else.”
“Do you not, then, know that, when God denies anything a child of his values, it is to give him something he values?”
“But if I do not want it?”
“You are none the less miserable just because you do not have it. Instead of his great possessions the young man was to have the company of Jesus, and treasure in heaven. When God refused to deliver a certain man from a sore evil, concerning which he three times besought him, unaccustomed to be denied, he gave him instead his own graciousness, consoled him in person for his pain.”
“Ah, but that was St. Paul!”
“True; what of that?”
“He was one by himself!”
“God deals with all his children after his own father-nature. No scripture is of private interpretation even for a St. Paul. It sets forth God’s way with man. If thou art not willing that God should have his way with thee, then, in the name of God, be miserable—till thy misery drive thee to the arms of the Father.”
“I do trust him in spiritual matters.”
“Everything is an affair of the spirit. If God has a way, then that is the only way. Every little thing in which you would have your own way, has a mission for your redemption; and he will treat you as a naughty child until you take your Father’s way for yours.”
There will be this difference, however, between the rich that loves his riches and the poor that hates his poverty—that, when they die, the heart of the one will be still crowded with things and their pleasures, while the heart of the other will be relieved of their lack; the one has had his good things, the other his evil things. But the rich man who held his things lightly, nor let them nestle in his heart; who was a channel and no cistern; who was ever and always forsaking his money—starts, in the new world, side by side with the man who accepted, not hated, his poverty. Each will say, “I am free!”
For the only air of the soul, in which it can breathe and live, is the present God and the spirits of the just: that is our heaven, our home, our all-right place. Cleansed of greed, jealousy, vanity, pride, possession, all the thousand forms of the evil self, we shall be God’s children on the hills and in the fields of that heaven, not one desiring to be before another, any more than to cast that other out; for ambition and hatred will then be seen to be one and the same spirit.—“What thou hast, I have; what thou desirest, I will; I give to myself ten times in giving once to thee. My want that thou mightst have, would be rich possession.” But let me be practical; for thou art ready to be miserable over trifles, and dost not believe God good enough to care for thy care: I would reason with thee to help thee rid of thy troubles, for they hide from thee the thoughts of thy God.
The things readiest to be done, those which lie not at the door but on the very table of a man’s mind, are not merely in general the most neglected, but even by the thoughtful man, the oftenest let alone, the oftenest postponed. The Lord of life demanding high virtue of us, can it be that he does not care for the first principles of justice? May a man become strong in righteousness without learning to speak the truth to his neighbour? Shall a man climb the last flight of the stair who has never set foot on the lowest step? Truth is one, and he who does
