Now this holds good for all other forms of Restlessness.  Every other form and kind of Restlessness in the world has a definite cause, and the particular kind of Restlessness can only be removed by removing the allotted cause.

All this is also true of Rest.  Restlessness has a cause:  must not Rest have a cause?  Necessarily.  If it were a chance world we would not expect this; but, being a methodical world, it cannot be otherwise.  Rest, physical rest, moral rest, spiritual rest, every kind of rest has a cause, as certainly as restlessness.  Now causes are discriminating.  There is one kind of cause for every particular effect and no other, and if one particular effect is desired, the corresponding cause must be set in motion.  It is no use proposing finely devised schemes, or going through general pious exercises in the hope that somehow Rest will come.  The Christian life is not casual, but causal.  All nature is a standing protest against the absurdity of expecting to secure spiritual effects, or any effects, without the employment of appropriate causes.  The Great Teacher dealt what ought to have been the final blow to this infinite irrelevancy by a single question, “Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles?”

Why, then, did the Great Teacher not educate His followers fully?  Why did He not tell us, for example, how such a thing as Rest might be obtained?  The answer is that He did.  But plainly, explicitly, in so many words?  Yes, plainly, explicitly, in so many words.  He assigned Rest to its cause, in words with which each of us has been familiar from his earliest childhood.

He begins, you remember—­for you at once know the passage I refer to—­almost as if Rest could be had without any cause; “Come unto me,” He says, “and I will give you Rest.”

Rest, apparently, was a favor to be bestowed; men had but to come to Him; He would give it to every applicant.  But the next sentence takes that all back.  The qualification, indeed, is added instantaneously.  For what the first sentence seemed to give was next thing to an impossibility.  For how, in a literal sense, can Rest be given?  One could no more give away Rest than he could give away Laughter.  We speak of “causing” laughter, which we can do; but we can not give it away.  When we speak of “giving” pain, we know perfectly well we can not give pain away.  And when we aim at “giving” pleasure, all that we do is to arrange a set of circumstances in such a way as that these shall cause pleasure.  Of course there is a sense, and a very wonderful sense, in which a Great Personality breathes upon all who come within its influence an abiding peace and trust.  Men can be to other men as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land; much more Christ; much more Christ as Perfect Man; much more still as Savior of the world.  But it is not this of which I speak.  When Christ said He would give men Rest, He meant simply that He would put them in the way of it.  By no act of conveyance would or could He make over His own Rest to them.  He could give them