Mere toys & baubles

Back to Man's religion & God's religion

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True religion must be everything or nothing with us. In religion, indifference is ruin—neglect is destruction. Of all losses, the loss of the soul is the only one that is utterly irreparable and irremediable.

You may lose property, but you may recover the whole or a portion of it—you may lose health, but you may be restored to a larger measure of bodily strength than before your illness—you may lose friends, but you may obtain new ones, and those more sincere and valuable than any whom you have lost. But if you lose your soul, what is to make up for that loss?

Do you ever feel what a tremendous stake heaven or hell is? Have you ever felt that to gain heaven is to gain everything that can make the soul eternally happy—and to lose heavenis not only to lose eternal bliss, but to sink down into unfathomable, everlasting, unutterable woe?

It is this believing sight and pressing sense of eternal things—it is this weighty, at times overpowering, feeling that they carry in their bosom an immortal soul, which often makes the children of God view the things of time and sense as mere toys and baubles, trifles lighter than vanity, and pursuits empty as air, and gives them to feel that the things of eternity are the only solid, enduring realities.