Sleep on Your Cares

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 17, 1872

Sleep on Your Cares.

MEN of business, believe me, there is now and then a profitable venture in doing nothing at all. In the power to put business aside, and abiding now and then in perfect quiet, things sometimes solve themselves, when we give them that advantage, which refuse to come clear for all our trying. We all know how, by simply taking some perplexity into the deepest silence this side death—a good night's sleep—we can do better sometimes than if we sat up and wrought at a task all night. When Matthew Murray, of Leeds, wanted to see his way through some sore perplexity in his inventions, and all other effort was of no use, he rested day and night from all noise, and all effort, except the effort an active man has to keep himself quiet, and then the thing he wanted would steal in and look at him, and light on him, and stay as birds used to light on the old hermits, no more afraid of them than of the trees under which they sat. And mothers, you may care and toil incessantly for your little ones, never resting a moment in your devotion; and then because you never do be quiet, but enter into your very closet with a little frock to mend, you shall never be quite able to take the whole sunlight and sum of your motherhood into your heart. You will be so full of care about the bread that perishes as to miss the bread that cometh down from Heaven. No person in the world needs so much now and then to be still, and open her soul only to the silence, as an earnest, energetic, whole-hearted mother. The eternal activity is almost sure to run at last into shallows.—Independent.