?

Now, here are two things. There is an apparently perfectly impossible
advice, and there is the only course that will make it possible.

I. An apparently impossible advice.

'Be careful for nothing.' I do not need to remind you--for I suppose
that we all know it--that that word 'careful,' in a great many places in
the New Testament, does not mean what, by the slow progress of change in
the significance of words, it has come to mean to-day; but it means what
it _should_ still mean, 'full of care,' and 'care' meant, not prudent
provision, forethought, the occupation of a man's common-sense with his
duty and his work and his circumstances, but it meant the thing which of
all others unfits a man most for such prudent provision, and that is,
the nervous irritation of a gnawing anxiety which, as the word in the
original means, tears the heart apart and makes a man quite incapable of
doing the wise thing, or seeing the wise thing to do, in the
circumstances. We all know that; so that I do not need to dwell upon it.
'Careful' here means neither more nor less than 'anxious.'

But I may just remind you how harm has been done, and good has been lost
and missed, by people reading that modern meaning into the word. It is
the same word which Christ employed in the exhortation 'Take no thought
for to-morrow.' It is a great pity that Christian people sometimes get
it into their heads that Christ prohibited what common-sense demands,
and what everybody practises. 'Taking thought for the morrow' is not
only our duty, but it is one of the distinctions which make us 'much
better than' the fowls of the air, that have no barns in which to store
against a day of need. But when our Lord said, 'Take no thought for the
morrow,' he did not mean 'Do not lay yourselves out to provide for
common necessities and duties,' but 'Do not fling yourselves into a
fever of anxiety, nor be too anxious to anticipate the "fashion of
uncertain evils."'

But even with that explanation, is it not like an unreachable ideal that
Paul puts forward here? 'Be anxious about nothing'--how can a man who
has to face the possibilities that we all have to face, and who knows
himself to be as weak to deal with them as we all are: how can he help
being anxious? There is no more complete waste of breath than those sage
and reverend advices which people give us, not to do the things, nor to
feel the emotions, which our position make absolutely inevitable and
almost involu