Simplicity and Honesty in Our Lives

January 28.

O fear the Lord, ye His saints:
for there is no want to them that fear Him.

PSALM 34, verse 9.


Thou openest Thine hand, and satisfies
the desire of every living thing.

PSALM 145, verse 16.


What Thou shalt today provide,
Let me as a child receive;
What to-morrow may betide,
Calmly to Thy wisdom leave.
'Tis enough that Thou wilt care;
Why should I the burden bear?

J. NEWTON.


Have we found that anxiety about possible
consequences increased the clearness
of our judgment, made us wiser and
braver in meeting the present,
and arming ourselves for the future?
If we had prayed for this day's bread,
and left the next to itself, if we had not
huddled our days together, not allotting
to each its appointed task, but ever
deferring that to the future, and drawing upon
the future for its own troubles, which must be
met when they come whether we have
anticipated them or not, we should have found
a simplicity and honesty in our lives, a capacity
for work, an enjoyment in it, to which we are
now, for the most part, strangers.

F. D. MAURICE.