leads many young couples to ruin themselves financially in an effort to keep up appearances and pay their social debts.  It is impossible to calculate the benefit which would be brought to the social world if Christ’s spirit could pervade it and infuse into it a wholesome sincerity and frankness.  Christ put the accent on the things that are worthy and banished the shallow pretenses upon which so much time is wasted and so much money squandered.

Christ gave the world a balm for that worry that is more wearing than work.  He condemned the petty vanities and irritating anxieties.  He taught a perfect trust that leads one to do his best and then leave the result with the Heavenly Father who is ever near and always ready to give good gifts to His children.

In Matthew 6, we find this soothing rebuke: 

Therefore I say unto you, Take no thought for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on.  Is not the life more than meat, and the body than raiment?  Behold the fowls of the air:  for they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your Heavenly Father feedeth them.  Are ye not much better than they?  Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?  And why take ye thought for raiment?  Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow:  they toil not, neither do they spin:  And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.  Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?

Reasoning unanswerable.  He argues from the less to the greater and with incomparable beauty woos man away from the distracting thoughts that dissipate his strength without yielding him any advantage.  The Creator who cares for the birds will not forget man made in His image; He who clothes the fields in the beauty of the flower and gives to the trembling blade of grass the nourishment that it needs for its fleeting day, will not desert man, His supreme handiwork.

“Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof,” is a rebuke aimed at those who borrow trouble.  Let not the past distress you—­it has gone beyond recall; let not the morrow intrude upon you—­it will bring its cargo of cares when it comes.  Man lives in the present and can claim only the moment as it passes, but Christ teaches him how to so use each hour as to make the days that are gone an echoing delight and the days that are yet to come a radiant hope.

Christ has been called a sentimentalist.  Let it be admitted; it is no reproach.  He is the inexhaustible source of sentiment, and sentiment rules the world.  “The dreamer lives forever; the toiler dies in a day.”

A striking illustration of the emphasis that Christ placed upon sentiment is found in Matthew 26:7-13: