The One Thing Needful

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Nov 25, 1873

The One Thing Needful.

“I REMEMBER,” says the Rev. George Butler, “a woman whose house was on fire. She was very active in removing her goods, but forgot her child was sleeping quietly in the cradle. At length she remembered her babe, and ran with earnest desire to save it. But alas! it was too late; the suffocating smoke and roaring flames forced her back, and in agony which none but a bereaved mother knows, she exclaimed, Oh, my child! I have saved my goods, but lost my child!”

So it will be with many a one at the last, who, “careful and troubled about many things,” has forgotten his soul.

I got a good trade, will one say, but I lost my soul; I got office, will another say, but—lost my soul; I got the world, I am now in hell, too poor, too helpless to obtain a drop of water to cool my parched tongue!

The loss of the soul is a loss irreparable. Other losses may be repaired, but there is no second soul for him that has lost one.

Reader, take care of thy soul first, other matters afterward; for, though you die here, you may live forever, and now, if ever, eternal life must be secured. “Now is,” emphatically, “the accepted time, now is the day of salvation.”