Lord's teaching? How does God feed the birds of the air? Is it not by
incessant and untiring effort on their part? Those who have watched a
pair of birds flying backwards and forwards to the nest under the eave
may well question whether industry can go further. But in the
unconscious being of a bird it is toil without [Greek: merimna],
without thought and worry, and becomes, therefore, the very picture to
us of trust in a higher Power, who has thus adjusted an unerring
instinct to an unfailing end. The insect and the bird provide for the
morrow, while they take no anxious thought for the morrow. "The agility
which achieves it is theirs, the skill and foresight absent from them
remain with God. And thus the simple life of lower natures, in its
unconscious surrender to involuntary though internal guidance, becomes
the negative type of perfect trust."[7]

But to leave his instincts and appetites to work, unimpeded and
unconscious, on their own plane, while he concerns himself with matters
of truly human interest, is just what man is not content to do. On the
contrary, he takes his higher and spiritual nature down into them. He
enhances their pleasure with all the powers of his imagination; he sets
his intellect to work to plot and plan for their gratification; he loads
them with the whole force of his spiritual will, and in so doing he
overloads and maddens them. The instinct for food and drink, which in
the animal is sufficient for the maintenance of health and activity, in
the man becomes gluttony and drunkenness; the instinct for the
preservation of the race becomes the licentiousness which produces
sterility and defeats its own ends; the instinct of self-maintenance
becomes the feverish greed and money-getting which leave no room for the
higher life of beauty, and science, and worship, and disinterested
service. "Seek ye first the material," says the world, "and all these
things shall be added unto you when you get the time for them"--which