Contentment

IT have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” — Puit. iv. 11. THROUGHOUT this epistle to the Philippians, there is a heightening tone of filial thankfulness and saintly triumph. Its first word is one of thankfulness, its last. of benediction. The Apostle gladly announces that the most contrary events have “fallen out unto the furtherance of the gospel,”’ — his very bonds had caused many of the brethren to “wax confident.” He says, “I joy and rejoice with you all;” he calls the church his “joy and crown;” and ina moment of high exultation and overbrimming gladness, he exclaims, “Be careful for nothing; but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known unto God.” Once again he says, “Rejoice in the Lord.” Joy is the key-note of this melodious letter. Why should this be accounted a remarkable circumstance? Might not joy sing in an apostle’s heart, as well as in the heart of garlanded conquerors and throned kings? The remarkable fact is this, that the man who thus rejoices, and summons

IB y, HIDDEN SPRINGS.

other persons to kindred gladness, isa prisoner! In his external condition there is nothing calling for joy of heart. The criminal’s chain is on the author’s hand, and even on that symbol of degradation he has no curse to pronounce. So happy a man never was bound to the throne of Nero. The chain binds him rather to the cross of Jesus than to the dungeon of the emperor. You expected the moan of angry discontent from the wronged bondsman, and lo, a happy song is on his lip! You expected to see a man bowed down with grief, and lo, a plumed head is lifted up in the sunshine! You thought his letter would have been deep-bordered with the blackness of mourning, and behold, it is fringed as with refined silver!

This problem must be solved. The man is mad, or the discontented world is mad. The secret must be examined and pronounced upon. When men are borne up in such ecstatic experiences, when their strong, free wing nears the sun, they necessarily express themselves in language dimly intelligible to men who are grovelling in the dust. Their glowing words are deemed poetic rather than practical; they are lethargically pronounced rhapsodical and extravagant; there is an unearthliness in their victor-tones; and men who never climbed a tree wonder how others can scale the stars.

What a banner is this that the Apostle floats from his Roman prison! Did ever human madness conceive so strange a device as that which it bears?

While men are on every hand complaining and repining, one voice is lifted up higher than all others, and its sweet word is — “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” There is an air of impossibility about the utterance. The speaker is in such a marked minority that we would gladly, in self-defence, charge him with insanity. We feel this all the more that the voice comes from the prison and not from the palace. It is not the imperial voice of Ceesar, but the voice of Czesar’s prisoner. The Festusworld is indignant, and cannot withhold the exclamation, “Paul, thou art beside thyself; much learning doth make thee mad.” Yes; “beside thyself:” the world is in deep debt to its madmen. These madmen keep the chariot-wheel in motion. They climb heights, and fathom depths, which strike terror into the coward-heart of their contemporaries. A man cannot attain any sublime moral experience without incurring the charge of madness. Christ was plainly told that He had a devil; and the men who told Him this would not scruple to call Jehovah Beelzebub. lt is difficult to interpret men who are upon a higher plane than ourselves; and, failing to interpret them, it is easy to roar up into the higher spheres a vague charge of madness. The madness of one age is the sobriety of the next. We must allow for a little foam: when the sea has lost its foam it may still be majestic, but I shall deem that its pulse has ceased and its eternal hymn been hushed in death.

“I have learned.” Special emphasis and fervour - must be thrown into this word “learned,” for it is one * of the key-words of the passage; it is a multitudinous word. It speaks of a school, and of education, of drilling and many-sided discipline. The whole utterance is that of a man who has been undergoing a process; who has been immured in alibrary, and who, having patiently read page after page, and undergone a severe and exhaustive examination, pronounces himself “learned.” If we stumble at the word “learned” we shall stumble all through the exposition. A man cannot come to this moral eminence by intuition: it is not to be attained in a moment of high inspiration of genius; nothing but the ripping plough, dragged by a fire-breathing team, and the pulverizing harrow, and the crushing roller: nothing but a discipline that grinds the bones, and racks the heart, and strains the very last suggestion out of the over-goaded brain: nothing but the hardships of earth, sanctified by the Spirit of heaven, can make the “learned” man of the text. Not books, but heavy burdens, — not gifts-of the intellect, but griefs of the heart, — not paid schoolmasters, but invisible, despotic, inexorable tutors, can carry us through the education which ends in this lofty refinement of learning.

The Apostle’s autobiography is at hand, and that will tell us somewhat of the educational course through which he passed : — “In much patience, in afflictions, in necessities, in distresses, in stripes, in imprisonments, in tumults, in labours, in watchings, in fastings:... by honour and dishonour, by evil report and good report: as deceiver, and yet true; as unknown, and yet well known; as dying, and behold we live; as chastened, and not killed; as sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; as poor, yet making many rich; as having nothing, and yet possessing all things.”

What think you of that? A man striking and swiftly recoiling, — hardly in one condition until he is thrown into another; just rising into honour, and suddenly plunged into dishonour; on the point of imagining himself well known, and in a moment the world shuddering with horror at the mention of his name! This rapidly alternating experience gives a man profound lore. It is not the gradual transition by which day darkens into night, and night brightens into day. If an analogy can be found in the firmament, it must be when storms are raging there, and light breaking through the gloomy masses: now is there a wing of deep blue, and anon the clouds shut it out from the eye of the admiring earth: this moment there is a fringe of beauty on the dark storm-cloud; and the next, thunder roars as if cursing the intrusion. We must not only have variety, but also suddenness and violence of alternation. Our bread must be snatched out of our hand at the very moment that our hunger pines for it, and the water dashed from our grasp when the fire is scorching our tongue. A discipline of

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this kind will teach us much of inconstancy and
mutation; much of the fickleness of eee
much of the rottenness of man.

Another page of the Apostle’s autobiography contains this : —

“Are they ministers of Christ? (I speak as a fool.) I am more; in labours more abundant, in stripes above measure, in prisons more frequent, in deaths oft. Of the Jews five times received I forty stripes, save one. Thrice was I beaten with rods; once was I stoned, thrice I suffered shipwreck, a night and a day I have been in the deep; in journeyings often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils by mine own countrymen, in perils by the heathen, in perils in the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren; in weariness and painfulness, in watchings often, in hunger and thirst, in fastings often, in cold and nakedness.”

No wonder that the Apostle, having passed through this rugged university, should emerge a man of profound and varied learning. He has seen life on every side. Books can do comparatively little in the education of the whole breadth of our manhood. They are useful up to a given point. They cannot be dispensed with in any course of liberal education. The world must always have its library. Authorship is a profession that never can decline. The pen shall flourish when the rust of ages has eaten up the barbarous sword. While this is happily true, it must be borne in mind that books can never give the learning which the Apostle here claims for himself. Stoning, and shipwreck, and scourging, and misrepresentation, and desertion; hunger, and thirst, and nakedness; fire, and pestilence, and sword; these must be the fierce teachers, and savage drill-sergeants, to whose discipline the heart must submit. He is but a learned fool who has read nothing but books. Such a reader can never pronounce with authority on any of the deeper problems of human life.

I rejoice that the Apostle has written this catalogue of his sufferings. Do you ask me why? Because it does the breaking heart good to hear the sob of another’s greater woe! The Bible could not have been God’s book had it been unmarked by the traces of manifold grief. I could not have read a Bible all sunshine. We need more than summer in any book that is to meet all the features and experiences of this apostate life. God has graciously permitted His servants to put on record the story of their struggles in the service of Jesus. Not only so; He has done more; He has actually inspired the pen that gave these harrowing delineations of suffering! In such a circumstance there must be a deep moral. Why keep up the memory of suffering? Why not permit the recollection to fade away? Why throw the weeds of desolation around life’s milestones? Why invest the shoulders of history with the scarf of the mourner? We thought that God would have carefully obliterated the footsteps of the destroyer; that He would have followed closely the march of history, and left nothing but the flowers of beauty and the sparks of glory! Instead of this, His own book is a record of human endurance even in His own service. This must be that other men who have yet to travel life’s weary way may be assisted in the accumulation of “learning.” Grief has been left sitting in the dark, damp valleys of history, that it might comfort grief. Sorrow pities sorrow. There is healing in the gentle touch of a wounded heart. Joy cannot talk to grief, — they would be ill-met interlocutors. Joy’s sharp, ringing, chiming laugh would grate harshly on the stunned ear of grief. You can never laugh a man out of his woes. See Jesus when He comes to speak to the bereaved sisters. Though His words are concerning the joyous subject of resurrection, yet they are jewelled with the tears of His tender pity. Tears understand tears. Hearts long sundered are brought into saintly fellowship by the mastery of a common woe. I cannot, then, have any hesitation in claiming all this explanation of how the Apostle became “learned” as a proof of the adaptation of Holy Scripture to meet all the exigencies of an ever-changing experience. It was merciful on the part of God to treasure up for coming ages the memorials of human suffering; and we should thank Him not only for preserving for us the light of the sun, but for preserving also the darkened chambers in which anguish has poured out her boiling tears!

This “learning” is not to be attained in a day; nor can it be attained prospectively. It must come little by little, and must come from the iron lips of fact rather than from the honied tongue of theory. When God sends the need He sends the strength too; and herein is that saying true, “As thy day, so shall thy strength be.” The world’s burden-bearers have ever said this; said it under scorching suns; said it under chilling skies; and if there has been a troubled moment of hesitation, it has been succeeded by a lifetime of childlike acquiescence.

The Apostle, then, became a “learned” man through long-endured hardship; and we must have time as one condition of attaining the same reach and tone of experience. It is hard for the young heart in its first paroxysm of grief to say, “I am content.” I cannot believe, and therefore will not teach, that God requires it «immediately to pronounce such deep and solemn words. God is the most patient of teachers, and as such He will not call for the lesson the moment He has given the book. Do you think that while the deep gash is still bleeding, a young heart whose summer visions have been quenched in utter darkness can say, with venerable apostles, “I am content”? Is a man to be branded as an infidel because he cannot sing songs of joy in the presence of the disaster which has made life a ruin? Go into that sick chamber. Shut yourself up there, and serve and wait until the darkness and the light become both alike to you. Serve through the cheerless day, — serve through the tedious night: touch every duty with the untiring hand of love: steal softly from place to place, lest a footfall should agitate the sufferer. Go on so for days and weeks; mark how all your suggestions prove useless, and how all your efforts fail. Gladly would you be cut up limb by limb if you could save the sick one. Bitterly you weep, and in anguish which devils might pity, you say, — “When such friends part, Tis the survivor dies.”

’ Long do you persist in hoping. When your heart is bursting you try to smile on the sufferer, as though there were no cause for alarm. When your bones smite one another in sore distress, and you stiffen in the cold of a great agony, you try to utter some tone of joy, but the lying word dies on the coward lip. Tell me how you feel when the terrible truth bursts upon you, that the eyes which have watched you with infinite interest for many a year can recognize you no longer, that upon them is settling the dim mist of too early death. When you realize that the heart which ever throbbed faithfully to your own is about to yield to the tyranny of Death: that the voice which was your sweetest and holiest music, will no longer break silence and charm you into the intercourse of love. Man! I ask thee, in the hearing of God, whether thou canst then say, “I am content”? Is not the hard-run heart overborne in that dread crisis? Can the swelling brain keep an unwavering balance? Would you not gladly rush through the nearest gate into eternity, and hail the emancipated one in the language of the better world? God is not angry with your hot tears. Like asa father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth you in that saddest and dreariest hour. He says, Be patient with the child: the storm has assailed him at the roots: give him liberty to weep himself into a moment’s rest. Thus God is gentle to us. He waits; He watches; He yearns; He gives us time to put off our shoes and to gather firmness while He communes with us from the flaming bush.

‘It is a hollow and vulgar religion — learned anywhere except at Bethlehem, Gethsemane, or Golgotha — that urges a man to say in his first agony, “I am content.” Do you know what it is to have only one ewe lamb, and to have it plundered from your gentle keeping? Do you know what it is to have one tree only in whose shade you could ever find rest, and to hear the ringing blows of the axe, sharp and heavy, without having any power to arrest the arm that wields the fatal weapon? I tell you, with God’s book open before me, that God will not be angry with your shiver of distress; will not pour contempt on the tears of your surging sorrow. God is tender: God is pitiful: God is sympathetic; and He will give power to the faint. I cannot believe that dry eyes are the highest test of heroism. Indifference is no attribute of Christian manhood. No tear is expected to start into the stony eye of the statue, but the eye of life beams the more brightly for the stream of sorrow that rushes through it. The man of deep grief is not to be charged with repining and discontent. The contentment of which the Apostle speaks is, happily, compatible with the fullest expression of nature’s trouble; so that the man bowed down by the tempest — riven and dismantled by the angry storm — may feel in his hottest agony a wish to be resigned to the highest will. This is acceptable with God. He knoweth our thought afar off. He marks the disposition long before it creates the act, and upon that He pours the light of His approbation.

Here is a lovely young creature, of lofty judgment, and pure heart, and hand undefiled. She is unobtrusive as a violet, constant as a star. Never did offensive word escape her well-watched lips. Never was her name associated with ungentle deed. Over her shines the summer sky; around her beam ten thousand mercies; the sun never sets on her heritage; the lines run through pleasant places. The poor pronounce her name with veneration, and the suffering listen eagerly for her words of sympathy. All the while, however, a cruel disease is insidiously striking its deadly roots; an enemy has fixed his unpitying eye on the young, fresh, noble heart; and his unchangeable purpose is to put the fatal shaft right through it.. Go and tell the doomed one that the writing of death is already sealed. Tell her that henceforward pain will be her daily portion — that every meal she eats is but an empty mockery of self-preservation — that the purest water is poured into secret fountains of poison — that the very breezes of summer are only making her more beautiful for death. I ask if, under such circumstances, you can expect the fated one to answer in a moment, “I am content”? No! She must have time for consideration; she must recover herself from the dizziness of so awful a bewilderment; she must put out her trembling hands for the rod and the staff, and after that she may endeavour, with quivering lip, to say, “I will fear no evil.” The young heart cannot reconcile itself to dying, all at once. The grimmest of all grim monsters cannot be called beautiful at first sight. There is no charm in his hollow eye or sunken cheek. Young life shudders at the monster’s hideous revelation; and even heaven itself looks less than heaven when it must be reached by the overthrow of so tremendous an enemy! One of the last of our loved ones who took wing from earth’s winter to heaven’s summer said, as she looked on the deep, wide, black river which men call death, “I have no doubt of going to heaven, but oh, the crossing, the crossing!” Ah! how that dreaded “crossing” made the heart cringe and shiver! Yet, when that dear, timid traveller came down to the cold river’s edge, reft of every plea but the plea that Jesus died, the God of the floods parted the waves before her feet, and she passed through as on dry ground! Thus is God ever better than our fears. He sends angels before us to prepare the way. Carefully, with hands of gentlest love, are the impediments removed. In our unfaith we look onward to some awful calamity, and lo! God puts on it a wreath of beauty, and we begin to pray where we expected to die!

We may now pass from the word “learned” to the word “content.” The one refers to a process; the other toa result. The solution:of the difficulty may, in my opinion, be condensed into a single sentence — the Apostle was “content” with every state as educational, not final. The whole mystery of the word is to be explained, I submit, by some such expression as educational, not final — preliminary, not ultimate. No man could be content with suffering as a permanent condition of being; but the Christian reaches that high moral estate in which he can not only accept, but even cherish it as a purifying and perfecting discipline. He is “content” with it as a preparation for something better; he is “content” with the plough, because it is preparing the very heart which it crushes to receive the seed which shall bloom in immortal beauty and fruitfulness,/ An illustration will bring the idea within the capacity of a child. You are building a mansion; you are engaged in a work which must be prosecuted little by little; you begin by digging deep foundations, and when the earth is opened like a gigantic tomb, I ask, Are you “content” with this? You answer, “Yes, as part of the process;” then you pile the roughest of the work as a great enduring basis, and I ask, Are you “content” with these immense, unpolished, and ungainly-looking stones? You answer, “Yes, as part of the process;” you are “content,” because each stage is essential to the completion, and your contentment arises from the progress and the prophecy rather than from each particular state of the work. Day by day you proceed, through shine and storm, “content” with everything that is done, because it is tending to the realization of your ideal. Were the work to be abandoned when it is only half done, you could not be “content” with it; but you are content with even the half when you know that the other half is to be perfected. Thus our light afflictions, which are but for a moment, work out for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory, while we look, not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen. Observe the words which are to receive the explaining emphasis. We bring “the power of an endless life” to bear upon the transient scenes of earth, and that “power” turns our heaviest woes into “afflictions which are but for a moment,” and thus we are more than “content,” and we “glory in tribulations also.” Thersame-idea may receive illustration from the case of a man who is engaged in the study of a language. He knows the price which he must pay, and has resolved to pay it. He sits down to the alphabet — the shell which contains the kernels of richest genius and attainment — and having mastered that, he is “content.” In what sense is he “content”? He cannot read Homer, or Virgil, or Dante; how, then, can he be “content”? The answer is, he is “content” with his acquisition as educational, not final — preliminary, not ultimate. He next proceeds to the primers, and having put monosyllables together, and seen, as it were, the faintest outline of an idea gleaming through the words, he is more and more “content.” He knows that this process must be accomplished, or he must remain in ignorance of the language. Patiently, therefore, he plods on until charmed with the numbers of the poet and informed by the narrations of the historian. The analogy would hold good also in the matter of pursuing a journey. The traveller is “content” with each mile, each scene, each tunnel, not on its own account, but because each brings him nearer his desired destination. Thus it should be in building human character. To-day a joy, to-morrow a grief; now on the hill-head, inhaling the life of the mountains; anon in the deep valley, cloaked with fogs or pelted with concentrated storms;

known yet unknown, honoured yet dishonoured, strong yet weak, passing through all the paradoxes which constitute a rich and manifold experience. We take life by instalments; we receive light by glimpses; we accept our joys in succession, and our sorrows come one by one; we are “content” with each, because, being anchored in the infinite ocean of divine love, we have “a good hope through grace;” we believe, therefore we are “content;” we do not count ourselves to have apprehended, but we “press toward the mark;’ and we go along life’s rugged way, saying, now with a song and anon with a sob, “I shall be satisfied when I awake with Thy likeness.”

This question “of. cena is emphatically one of great principles. l’The moment we close our eyes to the ultimate pra ious of the divine government, we are enclosed in utter night. Our sorrows blind us to everything but themselves. We persist in looking at

the things which are seen, rather than at the things which are not seen. We weep over the lock, forgetting that the key is at hand! yy The mysteries of life cannot be read in the artifidial light of time. Heaven must interpret earth. The secrets of the first volume will be fully revealed in the second. The morning cannot tell the story of mid-day ; — noon must be its own interpreter! Spring can only sing its own sweet lyric; it must leave summer to utter its deep, full, thrilling song! Don’t expect too much from earth;

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this acre, of which Death has taken a lease for all time, is not spacious enough to grow fruits on which immortality can feed. There is also a reflection arising from the fact that boundaries which we cannot pass are set round about us. Jobasks, as if affronted, “AmIa sea or a whale that thou settest a watch over me?” Jesus recalls this fact of our limitation, and founds upon it an argument — “Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature? If ye then be not able to do that thing which is least, why take ye thought for the rest?” As if He had inquired, “What does all your discontent amount to? Why attempt to do that which is impossible? Why not accept the allotments of paternal providence, and regard them as ladders on which angels descend and ascend in their ministry as servants of man?” The Apostle continues the remonstrance, and in his expostulation gives words of most inspiring assurance: “Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have.” This is severe, this is dogmatic; but listen, and you will see that it is the dogmatism of love — For He hath said, I will never leave thee nor forsake thee.” In this epistle, too, the Apostle dwells on the same theme. He talks much about himself. In many a verse round about the text the first personal pronoun may be found. He says, “I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.” This is personal detail. It sounds like boasting. The voice appears to be the voice of a man well. pleased with himself. But we must hear his whole statement; for just as our rashness is about to pronounce the Apostle an egotist, he reveals the golden secret of his mastery in the minor spheres, by saying, “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” It is enough! We deemed the boast presumptuous, whereas there blushes upon it the humility of deepest self-abasement. True contentment comes alone from Jesus. He understands us, and meets every requirement of our needy nature. He created angels, but he RE-DEEMED man; if the expression may be allowed, Christ is more closely identified with man than with any other class of intelligences in the universe. He bought him with His own precious blood. Only, therefore, as man is vitally related to Christ can he enjoy the contentment which is too profound to be agitated by changing circumstances. “These surface troubles come and go Like waves upon the sea; The deeper depths are out of reach To all, my God, but Thee.”

Need I employ the argument thus outlined for the purpose of clearing the field of fatal misapprehensions? Let no one quote these words as a plea for intellectual indolence. The wilfully ignorant man is not at liberty to desecrate the language by saying, “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” No book is so provocative of intellectual exertion as God’s book. From end to end there is a call for thought, and reasoning, and consideration, and growth. Every time the Bible asks man a question, it acknowledges the dignity, independence, and responsibility of hwman reason. Will you think of this, you who thoughtlessly talk about the dogmatism of revelation and the tyranny of faith? What more could even God himself do than submit the profoundest questions to your personal consideration and decision? There is in reality no book which confers so much honour on human reason as the very book which is blasphemously charged with ignoring it. Let no man use this text as a plea for moral deformity, saying, “I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.” This is not contentment. Contentment is not a negative but a positive condition of being. To claim contentment while in a state of unpardoned guilt, is to trifle with the foundations of moral life and government, and to insult, in one terrific act, the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost. Sin and discontentment can never be dissociated. “What God hath joined together let not man put asunder,” I will not therefore permit the rebellious to chant the words which can be truly uttered only by the lips of the loyal. Alas! are not the best of men occasionally rebellious? Much have I been reproved on this point. It was once my lot to wait upon a dying loved one — to mark her shrivelling cheek, and to weep over her dimming eyes. Such discipline never befel me. Aforetime I had fled from death, and had never looked upon any human being while enfolded in the last undreaming sleep. But now Death came: to wage war on my own hearth, and there was terrible earnestness in his method. He smote youth, and beauty, and tenderness, and then mocked the ruin he was working. In a whisper the dying oné asked me to read some of the words of Jesus — she knew that Jesus had fought and conquered the last enemy, and much she loved the Saviour’s name. Never was harder task allotted me, for grief conquers speech. I would rather have faced a ravening lion than undertaken that duty. I read, with hurried expression, how the blind man spake to Jesus about his blindness, saying, “Jesus, thou Son of David, have mercy on me.” Then the dying hearer said, “Don’t you berebellious, but utter that cry mightily.” The word cleft my heart. The dying seeking to inspire the living with hope and confidence so impressed me, that when the last sweet breath passed from the stricken breast, I called her MORE THAN CONQUEROR.

Do not cherish your griefs. They do but wear out the finest springs and faculties of nature. You must have grief. It is the lot of man: but let grief lean her aching head on great principle; let her pour her tears on the pitying bosom of the Saviour; and then round about her shall shine the rainbow which ever speaks of an unchanging covenant.

It would appear as though some persons delighted to prolong their grief. This may be affirmed even of some who profess Christianity. From the ancient church there comes a voice which such mistaken ones should heed: “Fret not thyself in any wise to do evil.” Are there not predictions which proclaim the final conquest of the trustful heart, and the perpetual overthrow of the rebellious spirit? “Let not thine heart envy sinners: but be thou in the fear of the Lord all the day long.” If we found our judgment. upon mere accidents, we shall stumble as the blind, we shall err as those who have no understanding. “When the wicked spring as the grass, and when all the workers of iniquity do flourish; it is that they shall be destroyed for ever.” God shall mock the men of false contentment, and on their boasted palaces He shall hail destroying fire! “There shall be no reward to the evil man; the candle of the wicked shall be put out.” We are not called upon to criticize God’s moral government. God is His own interpreter. “Cast thy burden upon the Lord; trust also in Him; and He shall bring it to pass.” This is the only method by which the spirit can know the meaning, the quiet, the joy, of perpetual content. Our repining dishonours Christ. It implies a lack of power on His part to give satisfaction to the aching heart. Every act of distrust is an act of dishonour towards the Saviour. Think, if Christ can carry the universe, is He not able to carry the handful of dust which you call your “property”? If He can govern and control all the affairs of creation, is He unequal to the supervision of your insignificant arcumstances? Be wise! Be wise now! “Delight thyself also in the Lord; and He shall give thee the desires of thine heart.”