Tuesday, July 16, 1996
Commemoration of Osmund, Bishop of Salisbury, 1099
What does this desire and this inability of ours proclaim to us but that there was once in man a genuine happiness, of which nothing now survives but the mark and the empty outline; and this he vainly tries to fill from everything that lies around him, seeking from things that are not there the help that he does not get from those that are present? Yet they are quite incapable of filling the gap, because this infinite gulf can only be filled by an infinite and immutable object—that is, God, Himself. He alone is man’s veritable good, and since man has deserted Him it is a strange thing that there is nothing in nature that has not been capable of taking His place for man: stars, sky, earth, elements, plants, cabbages, leeks, animals, insects, calves, serpents, fever, plague, war, famine, vices, adultery, incest. And since he has lost the true good, everything can equally appear to him as such—even his own destruction, though that is so contrary at once to God, to reason, and to nature.
... Blaise Pascal (1623-1662), Pensées (Thoughts) [1660], P.F. Collier & Son, 1910, #425, p. 138-139 
(see the book; see also Amos 8:11-12; Ps. 42; 86:10; John 4:13-14; 6:32-35; more at Apologetics, Emptiness, God, Happiness, Infinite, Man, Nature, Preach, Reason)
Compilation Copyright, 1996-2024, by Robert McAnally Adams,
Curator, Christian Quotation of the Day,
with Robert Douglas, principal contributor
Logo image Copyright 1996 by Shay Barsabe, of “Simple GIFs”, by kind permission.
Send comments to curator@cqod.com.
Last updated:
12/11/20
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