ne is, Sacrifice all
other things to the one thing needful. The present life is in
itself a worthless instant. The future life is an inexhaustible
eternity. And yet this infinite wealth of glory or woe depends on
how you act during that poor moment. Therefore you have nothing to
do while on earth but to seek the salvation of your soul. To waste
a single pulse beat on any thing else is the very madness of
folly. To find out how to escape hell and secure heaven, and then
to improve the means, this should absolutely absorb every energy
and every thought and every desire of every moment. This world is
a bridge of straw over the roaring gulf of eternal fire. Is there
leisure for sport and business, or room for science and
literature, or mood for pleasures and amenities? No: to get
ourselves and our friends into the magic car of salvation, which
will waft us up from the ravenous crests of the brimstone lake
packed with visages of anguish, to bind around our souls the
floating cord of redemption, which will draw us up to heaven, this
should intensely engage every faculty. Nothing else can be
admitted save by oversight of the awful facts. For is it not one
flexible instant of opportunity, and then an adamantine
immortality of doom? That doctrine of a future life which makes
eternal unalterable happiness or misery depend on the fleeting
probation allowed here yields but one practical moral; and that it
pronounces with imminent urgency and perfect distinctness. The
only true duty, the only real use, of this life is to secure the
forensic salvation of the soul by improvement of the appointed
means. Suspended by such a hair of frailty, for one breathless
moment, on such a razor edged contingence, an entrancing sea of
blessedness above, a horrible abyss of torture beneath, such
should be the all concentrating anxiety to secure safety that
there would be neither time nor taste for any thing else. Every
object should seem an altar drenched with sacrificial blood, every
sound a knell laden with dolorous omen, every look a propitiatory
confession, every breath a pleading prayer. From so single and
preternatural a tension of the believer's faculties nothing could
allow an instant's cessation except a temporary forgetting or
blinking of the awful scene and the immeasurable hazard. Such
would be a logical application to life of the genuine morals of
the doctrine under consideration. But the doctrine itself is to be
rejected as false on m