October 28

Fifteenth Monday after Trinity

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? S. Matthew 6:25.

MEN smile at the ignorance of savages who gave their gold in exchange for baubles of glass. They were philosophers compared to those who barter eternity for time. Evil is never so deadly as when it puts on an air of respectability. The worldliness which we have most to fear is a negative worldliness, a worldliness without great sins because it has not great temptations; a quiet unobtrusive worldliness, a worldliness which is the more hopeless because it substitutes self for God so universally, yet so imperceptibly, that the soul, like Samson, does not know that God is departed from it, that it is living without Him. Jesus says to each one of us, "I have chosen you out of the world." Chosen me, Lord! for what? "For Myself and for My love." This world of ours, sanctified by and all glistening with the precious Blood of Christ, is a happy world if God be our end. Then everything takes new hues of joy and love. Our daily comforts have a soul in them, for they abound in thanksgiving; our daily crosses have a special joy in them, because they are so tenderly fitted to us by the medicinal Hand of our God; the commonest acts of life are full of deep interest, because their end is God; daily duties are daily joys, because they are something which God gives us to offer unto Him, to do to our very best in acknowledgment of His love.

Then happy thou in all thy life, What so to thee befalls, Vea, double happy shalt thou be When God by death thee calls.