prudence and foresight; and surely our Lord did not come to do away
with Solomon's Proverbs, but to fulfil them. And more, Solomon
declares again and again, that prudence and foresight are the gifts
of God; and God's gifts are surely meant to be used. Isaiah, too,
tells us that the common work of the farm, tilling the ground,
sowing, and reaping, were taught to men by God; and says of the
ploughman, that 'His God doth instruct him to discretion and doth
teach him.' Neither can God mean us to sit idle with folded hands
waiting to be fed by miracles. Would He have given to man reason,
and skill, and the power of bettering his mortal condition by ten
thousand instructions if He had not meant him to use those gifts?
We find that, at the beginning, Adam is put into the garden, not to
sit idle in it, nor to feed merely on the fruits which fall from the
trees, as the dumb animals do, but to dress it, and to keep it; to
use his own reason to improve his own condition, and the land on
which God had placed him. Was not the very first command given to
man to replenish the earth and subdue it? And do we not find in the
very end of Scripture the Apostles working with their own hands for
their daily bread?

But what use of many words? It is absurd to believe anything else;
absurd to believe that man was meant to live like the butterfly,
flitting without care from flower to flower, and, like the
butterfly, die helpless at the first shower or the first winter's
frost. Whatever the text means, it cannot mean that.

And it does not mean that. I suppose, that three hundred years ago
(when the Bible was translated out of the Greek tongue, in which the
Apostles wrote, into English), 'taking thought' meant something
different from what it does now: but the plain meaning of the text,