6. "What of death--my own death? Shall I have grace enough to support me when the time comes?" Leave that! No doubt you will; but do not be anxious about it. To-day you are "the living;" be "the living to praise the Lord," and trust the needs of your dying hour to Him. The words of Christ recorded in these verses must have startled His hearers. They taught new truth concerning life, and, beautiful as they were, the truth they taught was strange. It would have been so strange as to be without weight, if He had not first taught equally new and equally beautiful truth concerning God. How does Christ here speak of God? "Your heavenly Father." The heathen instructors had not taught that! Pharisees and Sadducees had not taught that! But Christ was now in the world; He had come forth from the Father, and He could say to men: "Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of these things." Thus the whole teaching of these verses on the subject of Providence and of Faith becomes plain and demonstrative. The great requirement is for us to love Him filially as He loves us paternally; and then, from that point, all is clear. We are dependent, but He will provide. There are present difficulties, and probably there will be future trials; but all takes the form of wise and holy discipline under His guiding and beneficent hand. How do we arrive at the conviction of the Fatherhood of God? Sin stands in the way, and conscience craves something more than a mere authoritative announcement. Sin is the forfeiture of all claim to the Divine favour. What right have we to expect that His providence will be to us a providence of love? There is but one answer: to trust a God of providence, we must believe in a God of grace. Paul puts the whole philosophy of this in a single sentence: "He that spared not His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?" Our present subject, therefore, calls for the gospel, and cannot be completed without it. "Behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world." "He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." And, "If ye, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him?" But let us ever remember that we have higher wants than those of the body. The soul needs food, and God has supplied "the bread of life"; it needs raiment, and God has given to us the robe of righteousness wrought by Christ; it needs a home, and we have "a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens." With these provisions, then, shall we forecast the future with fear, or with hope? Which shall it be? O holy trust! O endless sense of rest, Like the beloved John, To lay my head upon the Saviour's breast, And thus to Journey on! XI. _CONTENTMENT._