No doubt this is a truism: but it is the meaning and force of these truisms which most easily escape us; custom is the blind of truth. No matter what it may be to which we put our hands, we are dealing with elements which only partially subject themselves to our control, or rather reveal to us the secret by which they may be bent to our use. Always there is a large variable element in the problem of our activities; and on this variable element, which we have no means of calculating, depends all that is most precious and vital in our results. Husbandry here is the great witness for, and key to, higher things. Certain bases are fixed and unalterable; else our work would be a pure lottery. Much on which its fruits depend is variable; else our work would be purely mechanical. God gives us a large measure of assurance, that we may work bravely and put our hearts into our labour, as those who have a right to hope that they will carry the sheaves of their harvest home; but He crosses our toil with a zone of uncertainties, that we may be faithful workmen, trusting and praying as well as working, and may be kept in holy and blessed dependence on Him who can lift us above all servile care for immediate results. Consider— 1. The awful force and inevitable certainty of the processes of Nature, the unfailing “order of Nature” which furnishes forth the field of our toils. That order God guarantees. The assurance is thus expressed: “_While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease_” (Gen. viii. 22). That word of promise which has nursed the trembling hope of man into strong certainty—for he is as sure that the sun will rise on the morrow as he is of his own existence—lies at the foundation of all his steady activity as a workman in this lower world. The joyful outgoings of the morning and evening, and the succession of the seasons, are given to him as the constant elements in his husbandry. These are assured to him by the voice that called them into being and the hand which sustains their motions. God tells him that he may count absolutely on this order. And what guarantee, when we come to think of it, have we of that order, but such as a firm belief in an intelligent Ruler of the universe, who sympathises with the hopes and blesses the toils of His children, affords? Then further,—