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There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, which can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all these points.
He is greatly mistaken whilst he thinks that a man can be so straitened betwixt two scandals, that he cannot choose but give the one of them. For, nulla datur talis perplexitas, ut necessarium sit pro homini sive hoc sive illud faciat, scandalum alicui dare.
There is no unum necessarium, or one thing needful, which can free human nature from the obligation of trying to come to its best at all these points. The real unum necessarium for us is to come to our best at all points.
Do then as Mary did, set the point of thine heart upon one thing: Porro unum est necessarium: "For one thing is necessary," the which is God.
174. +unum necessarium or one thing needful. Arnold refers here, and in his subsequent chapter title, Porro Unum est Necessarium, to Luke 10:42. Here is the context, 10:38-42. King James Bible. 177. +Romans 11:34. "For who hath known the mind of the Lord? or who hath been his counsellor?" King James Bible. 189-90. +Romans 2:21-22.
This is the sense attached to it in Lindenbrog's glossary on the capitularies, quoted by Grimm, op. cit. i. p. 502: "Eum ergo ignem nodfeur et nodfyr, quasi necessarium ignem vocant" C.L. Rochholz would connect need with a verb nieten "to churn," so that need-fire would mean "churned fire."
They are also free from that dominance of the unessential, which, in life as in literature, is a more innocent but more subtle and perhaps equally ruinous vice. That is why their simplicity is refreshing and salutary. Porro unum necessarium. In life human beings return from a distracting variety of interests to a few simple things; or, if they do not return, run the risk of losing their souls.
The Puritan's great danger is that he imagines himself in possession of a rule telling him the unum necessarium, or one thing needful,+ and that he then remains satisfied with a very crude conception of what this rule really is and what it tells him, thinks he has now knowledge and henceforth needs only to act, and, in this dangerous state of assurance and self-satisfaction, proceeds to give full swing to a number of the instincts of his ordinary self.
For the longing that he had to be with God, he would fain have been dead, but for the profit of other folk he was content to live here in pain, and defer and forbear for the while his inestimable bliss in heaven: "Desiderium habens dissolvi et esse cum Christo, multo magis melius, permanere autem in carne, necessarium propter vos."
"'But he wouldn't listen; and this is the result. "Edward seemed to ponder it deeply. He tried to starve himself to-day at lunch; and I refrained from pointing out to him that abstinence from meat at lunch was not the unum necessarium, for fear of confusing the ingenuous mind. I like to see people grasp the concrete issue in one of its bearings.
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