“Nothing teaches us about the preciousness of the Creator as much as when we learn the emptiness of everything else.”
C. H. Spurgeon
I doubt that Spurgeon, a prominent nineteenth-century British Protestant evangelist, really intended to say that love within families, natural beauty, powerful music, profound literature, and other such things are really — absolutely — empty. If so, I surely don’t agree with him. But, relatively speaking, I think he has an important point.
I don’t believe that even such very good things can ultimately satisfy, in and of themselves.
It’s not unlike St. Augustine’s remark, addressing God at the beginning of his Confessions, that “our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee.” I also think that, when the divine is perceived as suffusing great art, literature, and music, and as pointed to by natural splendor and human love, all of those things are thereby enriched and deepened.
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