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More exactly the meaning is this: "Keep thine heart beyond everything else you keep; guard thine heart above all else, for out of it are the issues of life." Not your health, not your reputation, not your business credit, not your property — beyond all these things give time and thought to the culture of your heart. If you must take time from one thing or another, rather starve your business than let your heart run to waste. Your heart — what has your heart got to do with your actual life? John Stuart Mill's father thought it counted for nothing, or, rather, it was a bad debt, it was a loss, it was a detriment to have a heart, to have feelings, to have emotions. Power, intellect, and strength of will, these were the elements to make a man, and the less heart he carried about with him — well, the less dead weight and the less risk of his being led wrong. And the Bible comes in and says to the business man, "Beyond your books and your accounts and your shops and your speculations and your clients, watch over your heart, think about it, take care of it, toil to keep it in health and in beauty." The Bible comes and says the same thing to the servant girl trying to do her duty faithfully, to the working man wishing to improve his position in the world, to the learned man bent on discovering new truth. Yes, your toil, your ambition, your researches, your discoveries, commerce, industry, learning, are all of them good, but the most precious thing is the human heart. Whatever else suffers, see that your heart does not suffer. This proverb runs right in the teeth of the whole mass of our daily life; runs against the whole current and tendency of our education, and our habits, and our notions. The proverb gives its reason — a reason that will stand and hold its own in the court of common sense, as well as at the last judgment. "Beyond everything else, take care of your heart, for out of your heart are the issues of your life." Not out of your body, not out of your intellect, not out of your business, not out of your property, not out of your wisdom, not out of your fame — out of your heart are the essential elements and sustenance of your life, its last results for joy or for sorrow. "Out of the heart are the issues of life." The phrase makes a picture. You are travelling in the desert with a caravan over the hot sand. The sky above you with a sultry sun in it, the hot ground beneath your feet, your eye wearied, tired, inflamed by the glare above, the glare below; you long to set eyes on the green leaf. In the distance you get sight of something in the air. You draw nearer to it, it grows and forms itself, framed there in the wilderness like a picture — a clump of palm-trees; beneath, green grass; in the branches, birds singing; lazy cattle reclining on the herbage, sheep bleating. You penetrate into it, you discover the tents and homes of men; women and children playing around, life, beauty. Whence, whence all that? Right there in the centre of it you come on a deep, brimming pool of water, fed by a perpetual fountain, like an eye looking up to the sky — ah, more than an eye, the very fountain of all that greenness and beauty; blossom, herbage, sheep, cow, bird, man, woman, child, all of them the outcome of that springing fountain of water. "Out of it are the issues of life." Poison it, and all that dies. Turn it brackish, and all withers and diminishes and decays. Quench it, stop it, and the desert flows over the green oasis. Like that fountain of living water is your heart within you. Your heart it is that makes your life to flow, fair, radiant, or poor, poverty-stricken, cold, dead. What is your heart like? What is a man's heart? Well, it is not easy to describe that, and yet we all know well enough what we mean by it. We cannot just put our finger on where it is, or say precisely what it is; but oh, how well you know when your heart bounds with joy, or when it grips together with sharp pain, sorrow, disappointment! Oh, you know it is just the inner core of cravings and hopes and eager wishes and conscious personal thoughts and plans and purposes and attributes that makes you your own very self, that gives you your disposition, that makes up your temperament, that settles your character, that fashions your conduct. Oh, what a blunder a man makes when he thinks that his life will be planned and made by his intellect! There never yet was a man who thought that by his mind he could steer his own course through the world that did not find his heart steal a march upon him. A man's heart — that is what makes him, that is what determines a man's choice at all the great critical points in life. A man's heart it is that settles what his home is to be, that chooses the partner that is to be his, for better, for worse, for him, for her. It is a man's heart that chooses fleshly, that chooses spiritually; that chooses unselfishly, that chooses selfishly; that chooses for the outward appearance, or chooses for heart-worth. "Oh," you say, "there is not much heart in a great many of these things." I beg your pardon, there is: plenty of heart, but it is base, worldly, greedy, grasping heart; or silly, selfish, vain, flattered heart. When a man's life shows little or nothing of the echoes of lofty, generous, chivalrous thought and purpose and endeavour, we constantly use a false expression, saying, "He has got no heart." How is it that a score of men that are your daily associates or friends, all of them educated pretty much on the same level, similar to one another in manner, of the same deportment, and even the same politics — how is it they are all so unlike you? Is it that the one man's talk is tiresome and wearisome? How is it that you feel as if he were made of wood? How is it that the other man has that glow and sparkle that sends a thrill through you, that stimulates you, that makes you think, that so brings out responses that you admire your own cleverness? What makes the difference? Why, it is not the amount of grammar the one learned more than the other, or that the one has read more books. No, not that. It is the inner core and kernel of the one man compared with what is inside the other. Heart, rich heart! for out of the heart in very deed and truth are the ripe, supreme issues of life — life social, life personal, life earthly, and life eternal. Now, if that be true, that a man's life really depends, beyond everything else, on his inner man, on his heart, on his disposition, on his temperament, on his character formed within him, how is it that we do not take a deal more trouble to take care of our hearts? Ah, there are a lot of books that talk about success that are full of the devil's lies. A man is a great success because he died a millionaire! Oh, a man may make himself a millionaire and miss making himself a man in the image of God, in the likeness of Christ. Success in life is measured by the heart you die with. Why, then, do not we take more pains about our hearts? How many of us do it? For every one of you knows that is just the thing we neglect. Even our bodily hearts, I suppose, physicians would tell us, we do not take half care enough of. Rather than lose five minutes and miss a train we run, and risk sudden death, or actually damage the working of the central fountain of life in our bodies. And how we ever toil and tax the whole inner core of that body of ours for things not worth it. For, if a man loses his health, what is money to him? Yes, we imagine that our hearts take care of themselves. No man imagines that his accounts will collect themselves. No man imagines that his house will repair itself. Why, you must give as much care to the ties of love and children, if you are to keep these beautiful and fair, as you do to make your garden free from weeds, and your house water-tight and weather-tight, and your business a solvent concern. And besides, there is another mistake that people make. They say to themselves, "I am not the one that makes my heart. It is the life that I have to live that should make my heart; it is my circumstances, my fortunes. I am a very miserable man indeed, always careworn and anxious; never able to feel bright and cheerful. When I hear my neighbour whistling in the evening in his garden I envy him; but then he has not the worries that I have." Very likely he has got much worse ones, but he has got the sense to leave them down in the office. That is how he kept his health. It was not easy. The cares and anxieties followed him into the train, got out at the station, stole up the garden; but the man had the wisdom and the strength to slam the door and not let them in. That is how he kept his heart and brain and health up, and his inmost heart of all. How is a man to make the most of his heart? How to keep it pure in this foul world? How to lift it above the grime, and the dust, and the tear and wear? How to make it large and noble, the biggest and most beautiful according to God's plan? By not leaving it in this world, but by taking it out of this world? Ah, no; not out of this world, but in this world to bring it into another World; not by keeping it to yourself and making it in the measure of your own self, but by taking that heart of yours and letting Christ into it — the real, simple human Jesus. Oh, beyond all thy keeping, keep thy heart! and that thou shalt do best by giving it away to Christ.

(Prof. Elmslie.)

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KJV: Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life.

WEB: Keep your heart with all diligence, for out of it is the wellspring of life.