love of self and the love of the world bear rule, and find their gratification and satisfaction in worldly enjoyments, and that place is man’s depraved and spiritually dead heart.  The shadow of death signifies that beclouded state of the understanding which is the inevitable consequence of being satisfied to sit in darkness.  Is not this altogether a frightful picture of man’s unenlightened and unregenerate state?  But it is a true picture, for it is given by the Lord, who knows what man is and what is in man.

Have I wandered away from my text?  By no means.  I have held up this picture to show that man is so deeply sunk in darkness or ignorance regarding himself and God that without instruction in the truths of God’s holy Word he does not know and he never would know what he does need.  Prior to the discovery of America the native Indian did not know that he needed anything beyond what he then had in a natural way.

When the white man came and got acquainted with him he might have addressed him in the exact words of my text as applied to his social, moral and civil state and surroundings:  “One thing is needful.”  That one thing, properly infused and evolved, and in connection with such infusion and evolution therefrom, properly applied to use, would have transformed him from a savage to a civilized state; from temporal misery and wretchedness into the enjoyments of life, liberty and the high pursuits of happiness.

You may now wonder what that one thing would have been.  One word expresses it all, and that word is EDUCATION.  The wonderful gifts of divine goodness, in the shape of latent treasures of coal, iron, and the precious metals; the exhaustless fertility of American soils; the salubrity of its climates; the boundless power of its falling streams, all, all these were here for the Indian alone, for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years before the white man came.  Why did he not use them?  Because he lacked the one thing needful, the proper education or development of his mind, the knowledge of understanding the ways and means of converting the heterogeneous into the homogeneous; the useless into the useful; the ill-formed into the suitable.  What the Indian lacked is the very basis of the white man’s individual and national prosperity.

I have here laid a broad foundation on which I hope to erect a superstructure of doctrine that may do us all good.  I will here say that EDUCATION into the knowledge and love of God’s revealed Truth in its true relation to man’s life is the one thing needful to every human being.  I use the word EDUCATION in its most comprehensive and exalted sense, that of preparing the mind and heart for the attainment of the highest and noblest ends of life on earth and in heaven.  In this sense it takes in salvation with its happy experiences and results.  It takes in regeneration, that wonderful and radical change in man wrought by God through his Holy Spirit, by which man passes from darkness to light, and out of death into life.