Beware of One Sin

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Jan 30, 1872

Beware of One Sin.

WHILE I was walking in the garden one bright morning, a breeze came through and set all the leaves and flowers fluttering. Now that is the way flowers talk; so I pricked up my ears and listened.

Presently an elder tree said, “Flowers, shake off your caterpillars.”

“Why?” said a dozen altogether, for they were like some children who always say, “Why,” when they are told to do anything. Bad children, those.

The elder said, “If you don’t, they’ll gobble you up.”

So the flowers set themselves a shaking till the caterpillars were shaken off.

In one of the middle beds there was a beautiful rose, which shook off all but one, and she said to herself, “Oh! that’s a beauty; I’ll keep that one.”

The elder overheard her, and called out, “One caterpillar is enough to spoil you.”

“But,” said the rose, “look at his brown and crimson fur, and his beautiful black eyes, and scores of little feet. I want to keep him. Surely he won’t hurt me.”

A few months after, I passed the rose again. There was not a whole leaf on her; her beauty was faded and gone; she was all but killed, and had only life enough to weep over her folly, while the tears stood like dew-drops on her tattered leaves.

“Alas! I didn’t think one caterpillar would ruin me.”

One sin indulged has ruined thousands.