And, in this upshot, purposes mistook
Fallen on the inventors’ heads.”
TO-DAY’S SUFFICING EVIL, AND TO-MORROW’S FORECAST CARE.
St. Matthew vi. 34.
With a divine calm fall those words from the Sermon of the Mount—spoken as never man spake—which bid us take “no thought for the morrow; for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.”
Pagan philosophy had, and natural theism has, its approximation to the same point of view. Horace is all for letting the mind enjoy the enjoyable present, and for leaving no room or resting-place for the sole of the foot of Black Care, raven and unclean bird that she is. The morrow may be hers, but to-day at least is his, and the morrow shall take care for the things of itself:
“Lætus in præsens animus quod ultra est
Oderit curare.”
David Hume, again, meets the doctrine that we should always have before our eyes, death, disease, poverty, blindness, calumny, and the like, as ills which are incident to human nature, and which may befall us to-morrow,—by the answer, that if we confine ourselves to a general and distant reflection on the ills of human life, such a vague procedure can have no effect to prepare us for them; and that if, on the other hand, by close and intense meditation we render them present and intimate to us, we realise the true secret for poisoning all our pleasures, and rendering us perpetually miserable. He grieves more than need be, who begins to grieve before he need, is one of Seneca’s sententious sayings: Plus dolet quam necesse est, qui ante dolet quam necesse est. One of Mrs. Gore’s women of the world—who might probably be counted by the hundred—is sprightly and smart in her rebuke of her husband and his sister for their delight in perplexing the brightest moments of existence by all the agonies of second sight, and whom she represents as quite indignant when they find her sympathy waiting the actual occurrence of evil. “I hate,” she says, “to turn back my head towards the dark shadow that follows me, or direct my telescope towards a coming storm.” And herein was she wise, if not with all the wisdom of those Christian morals, of which we have so impressive an expositor in Sir Thomas Browne. “Leave future occurrences to their uncertainties,” writes the fine old physician, Religiosus Medicus, “think that which is present thy own; and, since ’tis easier to foretell an eclipse than a foul day at some distance, look for little regular below. Attend with patience the uncertainty of things, and what lieth yet unexerted in the chaos of futurity.” Shakspeare’s noble Roman, at the dawn of the day of battle on which so much depends, is natural man enough to utter the aspiration: