ONE DROP AT A TIME

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 3, 1880

ONE DROP AT A TIME.

"Life," says the late John Foster, "is expenditure; we have it, but as continually losing it; we have the use of it, but as continually wasting it. Suppose a man confined in some fortress, under the doom to stay there until his death; and suppose there is for his use a dark reservoir of water, to which it is certain none can ever be added. He knows, suppose, that the quantity is not very great; he cannot penetrate to ascertain how much, but it may be very little. He has drawn from it, by means of a fountain, a good while already, and draws from it every day. But how would he feel each time of drawing, and each time of thinking of it? Not as if he had a perennial spring to go to; not, 'I have a reservoir, I may be at ease.' No; but, I had water yesterday—I have water to-day; but my having had it, and my having it to-day, is the very cause that I shall not have it on some day that is approaching. And at the same time I am compelled to this fatal expenditure! So of our mortal, transient life! And yet men are very indisposed to admit the plain truth, that life is a thing which they are in no other way possessing than as necessarily consuming; and that even in this imperfect sense of possession, it becomes every day less a possession!"