"A Study of Eternity"

Some books take me a very long time to read because I feel like I need to spend some time absorbing important passages before I move along. Really, some of these passages are worthy of a lifetime of reflection. The Intellectual Life: its Spirits, Conditions, Methods by A.G. Sertillanges, O.P. is one such book.

Here is a segment on how truth lead us to God, and vice-versa...

Everything that instructs us leads to God on a hidden byway. Every authentic truth is in itself eternal, and its quality of eternity turns us towards the eternity of which it is the revelation. Through nature and the soul, where can we go if not towards their origin? If one does not get there, it is because one has gone off the path. At one bound the inspired and right mind goes beyond intermediaries, and to every question that arises within it, whatever particular answers it may make, a secret voice says: God!

Therefore, we have only to leave the mind on the one hand to its upward flight, on the other to its attention, and there will be set up, between the object of a particular study and the object of religious contemplation, an alternating movement which will profit both. With a rapid and often unconscious impulse, we pass from the trace or the image to God, and then, coming back with new vigor and strength, we retrace the footsteps of the divine Walker. We now find things have a deeper meaning, are magnified; we see in them an episode of an immense spiritual happening. Even while we busy ourselves with some trifling thing, we feel ourselves dependent on truths in comparison with which the mountains are ephemeral; infinite Being and infinite duration enfold us, and our study is in very truth, "a study of eternity." (pgs. 32-33)

It reminds me of something that really blew me away when I first remember hearing it in a theology class at TAC, even though it seems obvious now, that "all learning is for the sake of knowing Christ."