2. The one thing needful does not supersede all other things. It does not rob us of all other interests. In accepting and following Christ, we are not as a rule called to withdraw from any of those great primal influences that replenish and illuminate life, and make natural living bright and full and glad ; we receive them afresh from the hand of the Saviour we have accepted, to be ours with a new safety, ours by a new right. Society may remain to us; but social intercourse will be purified. Beauty may remain to us ; but our sense of the beautiful will be regulated, our standard of the beautiful will be raised. Culture may remain to us ; but it will be culture through the purest sources, culture for the highest ends. Kelaxation may remain to us ; but it will be relaxation guarded by Christian principles, and made subservient to Christian aims. In the choosing and pursuing of the one thing, we have the assurance that the lower things will be sanctified, so long as these lower things abide. And if they abide not, but pass, then the gospel will make up for their absence by more than compensating elements in itself : for society, the fellowship of the faithful ; for beauty, the beauty of holiness; for culture, the enlightening, the expanding, and the refining influences of the Word of God ; for relaxation, the quiet of Christian meditation, or the timely relief of changes in Christian work.
^ To all highly sensitive natures which shrink from action and effort, which are revolted by the coarseness, the stupidity, the brutality of the world, it is a great temptation to get away from it all, and to live life more congenially in the contemplation of perfection. The contemplative man finds the vision of moral
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purity and holiness so ineffably beautiful and sacred that he is sorely tempted to conceal it, to enjoy it, to lose himself in it. If he speaks of it, the rough comments and the dull derision of the world are so wounding, so cruel, that he does not venture to profane it. Here he diverges from the method of Christ, whose whole teaching was devoted to setting out in the simplest terms the beauty of holiness ; and the amazing secret growth of Christianity, which ran like an electric pulse over the world, testifies to the fact that thousands of hearts had the same dim vision, and only needed that it should be defined.^
3. The one supreme thing keeps other things in their proper place and colours the whole of life. The nearness of the Divine, as it diffuses itself over the soul's horizon, permeating the inner and outer courts thereof, will give colour and character to all the things of the life that now is. Earth will be purified by being taken up into the embrace of the spiritual. All will be informed with a " light that never was on sea or land." As heaven bows down, overshadowing and permeating our spirits, earth, standing in the presence thereof, will be compelled to put off its shoes and be made in its expression to harmonize with it. It will then become a help instead of a hindrance to the upward longings, affections and movements of the soul. There has been no natural antagonism placed between them on the part of their Maker. They are full of mutual analogies, the one being but the vestibule of the other, or the lower part of a ladder by which the soul is, or should be, helped upward to the vision and joy of Divine things.
What if earth be but the shadow of heaven,
And each to other like more than on earth is thought?
^ Astronomers were long puzzled by certain minute bodies that revolve in the highway of the planets, too small and too numerous to be accounted separate satellites, revolving round the sun in mixed and interlacing orbits. At length the thought was hit upon that these were the fragments of a larger planet shattered out of its original unity, yet retaining the direction of its original impulse and continuing to revolve as disjointed members of that which was a planet no more. The finger of their great Former had implanted in them a law under which they still moved even in ruins. So it is with our human heart ; the
1 A. C. Benson, Thy Rod and Thy Staff, 141.
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restless search, the constant care and cumber, the unslaked thirst for happiness, the saying " Who will shew us any good ? " — these are the traces of a divinely implanted law. The soul is dislocated and out of joint, and hence the law breeds nothing but confusion and distraction. Only get the central gravitating power restored, only let all desires and strivings find their satisfaction in the one thing needful, and the same law is the harmony of the soul — the equilibrium of the heart.^
4. The " one thing " is a lasting possession. In all the years to come, Mary was to carry as a treasure in her soul the memory of that hour. She had sat at Jesus' feet, she had looked into HiS' loving face, she had seen in the depths of His eyes the preparation for the giving of Himself for her and for the sins of the world. The memory of that hour was to remain so vivid, so satisfying, so compelling, in all her later life, that she entered at once into the knowledge of that new intimacy with the Eisen Lord which was expressed in His promise : " Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."