I. There is a kind of low-toned care which is heard, as it were, in the distance, surging and moaning as it breaks upon the shore of human life; and many a man's music is this melancholy dirge or undertone of human life. Those that have it not are often called children of levity, and those that have it are often called serious, sober, earnest, religious people. Now, our Master tells us that this particular form of mental activity is useless that nothing good ever comes of it. He who works in a spirit of fear and solicitude and anxiety doubles and trebles the laboriousness of labour.
II. Not only does this spirit of reprehensible care make the burdens of life heavier and the experiences of life sadder, but it converts one of the most joy-inspiring of our faculties into a minister of misery. The element of faith, that which we call imagination, the peculiar constitution of the understanding by which it brings home to itself things invisible, that power of the mind by which the whole of our life is largely opened into the future this is perverted by care.
III. Then another ill-effect is that it takes away good-nature. Good-nature is the generic form which is produced by all the Christian graces. As light is white, although it is made up of all the other coloured rays, so I think hope and love and joy and peace, mingled together, make good-nature. A man who has good health and good-nature, and is a good man through and through, asks no favours of fortune and asks none of God; he asks only that he may be grateful to God for such blessings. And there is nothing that pecks at a fair life, and scratches its brilliant surface and undermines it, sooner than this anxious care. It is a sort of south-east wind of the soul, that does not rain, but chills everything.
IV. No craven-hearted man was ever fit to be a citizen. Courage is the source of patriotism. In looking upon the commonwealth, believe in providence, believe in God, believe in the blessedness of the future.
H. W. Beecher, Christian World Pulpit,vol. x., p. 252.
Reference: Matthew 6:31-33. C. Kingsley, Sermons for the Times,p. 203.