Spirit Jesus

Another set of thoughts, more common still and not decried, are murmuring thoughts. Ah me! how full some people are of these!

They can hardly speak but what they have something to grumble about. Trade with them is also always bad. Ever since I have been in London trade has been bad, but it is even worse now. It never was so bad as it is now, except that it was just as bad last year; and, as far as I know, has always been at the worst.

Farmers never have, to the best of my recollection, had more than “an average crop”, and most years there has been a failure. If the wheat has been good, the turnips have always gone bad, or something.

I notice murmuring to be a very common thing with many people, and you no sooner sit down in their cottage than, instead of telling you that someone has been there to help them a little and give them some assistance, they say they have only the parish allowance — a miserable pittance!

So it is; but they forget the mercies that they have. Why should I be always telling how often I have rheumatic pains, and how many times I find that there is something wrong with my constitution? Why should I make it my constant habit to compel everybody to be miserable wherever I go?

“Well”, says one, “but you know we cannot help it!” My dear friend, then if you do not help it, I will tell you what will be the fruit of it — you will make yourselves incorrigibly miserable. You will bring yourselves into a desperate state, in which nothing will comfort you.

I do believe that in this respect we are very much our own masters. Not all the bounties of Providence can make us happy, if we have a thankless, ungrateful heart. You may have all the world can give you, and yet be wretched; or you may be very, very poor, and yet be cheerful.

A thankful heart is essential, and oh! may God be pleased to give us that thankful heart! But what I want you to remember is that murmuring is a great sin. They murmured against God in the wilderness, and He sent fiery serpents among them. God thinks much of our complaints against His providential dealings with us; let us not think so little of the sin of provoking Him with our thoughts!

Christian Classic Literature
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