Now, what does all this come from? It comes from a distrust in God's love and providence. It comes from a feeling like what the apostles had, as we read in to-day's Gospel, as if He who ought to take care of them were asleep; but they ought to have known, as their own psalms could have taught them, that "He shall neither slumber nor sleep that keepeth Israel." Even though they knew him not to be God, they should have known that God, who had sent him into the world, and on whom their faith in him rested, would not allow them to come to any harm; and they should have been willing, when they had done their own duty, to trust in his providence for the rest. {100} They might, indeed, well have waked him to get his help and advice as to what to do; but he, who read their hearts, knew that their anxiety had its source, not in prudence, but in distrust, and so he deservedly rebuked them, saying: "Why are you fearful, O ye of little faith?" That is the reason why we, like the apostles, are worrying. It is because we have little faith. We distrust God's providence and mercy, and spend our time in this distrust and complaining, instead of quietly finding out and doing our own duty, and then simply and confidently leaving the result to him. But we have less excuse for it than they, for we know more of him than they did then. Let us, then, be ashamed of our want of faith, and try to do better in this respect for the future. ---------------------- Sermon XXVI. _And behold, a great tempest arose in the sea._ --St. Matthew viii. 24. Almost all of us, my dear brethren, have at some time of life been in a position like that of the apostles in their little boat on the Sea of Galilee. We have been out at sea in a storm, with the waves beating against our frail craft and threatening to swamp it every moment. So we do not need to draw on our imagination to realize what their feelings must have been. {101} Perhaps you may think I am exaggerating when I say this; most of you, I suppose, cannot remember ever having been in a storm at sea. But it is quite true, nevertheless. Only the sea and the storm were far more dangerous ones than those to which the apostles were exposed that night. For the sea over which you were, and still are, sailing is the sea of this mortal life; and the storm was the storm of temptation; and the danger was that of death, not to the body, but to the soul.