the Third Week of Advent
Click here to join the effort!
Bible Dictionaries
Sin: One the Souls Ruin (2)
Spurgeon's Illustration Collection
or
While I was walking in the garden one bright morning, a breeze came through and set all the flowers and leaves a fluttering. Now that is the way flowers talk, so I pricked up my ears and listened.
Presently, an old elder tree said, Flowers, shake off your caterpillars!'
'Why?' said a dozen altogether: for they were like some children, who always say 'Why,' when they are told to do anything: bad children those!
The elder said, 'If you don't, they'll eat you up alive.'
So the flowers set themselves a shaking till the caterpillars were shaken off.
In one of the middle beds there was a beautiful rose, who shook off all but one, and she said to herself 'Oh, that's a beauty! I'll keep that one.'
The elder overheard her, and called out, 'One caterpillar is enough to spoil you.'
'But,' said the rose, 'look at his brown and crimson fur, and his beautiful black eyes, and scores of little feet; I want to keep him; surely one won't hurt me.'
A few mornings after, I passed the rose again; there was not a whole leaf on her; her beauty was gone; she was all but killed, and had only life enough to weep over her folly, while the tears stood like dew-drops on her tattered leaves.
'Alas! I didn't think one caterpillar would ruin me.': C. A. Davis.
These files are public domain.
Text Courtesy of BibleSupport.com. Used by Permission.
Spurgeon, Charles. Entry for 'Sin: One the Souls Ruin (2)'. Spurgeon's Illustration Collection. https://www.studylight.org/dictionaries/eng/fff/s/sin-one-the-souls-ruin-2.html. 1870.
