Crying After Knowledge: The Earnest Search for Virtue

"Yea, if thou criest after knowledge" (Proverbs 2:3). All knowledge deserves respect—no kind of learning should be despised. The bee gathers honey from every flower; what shore so bleak, what moor so barren, what rocks so naked that we cannot carry home some instructive object, whether plant or mineral? Similarly, there exist no circumstances in which we are placed, no persons however humble with whom we associate, without learning something previously unknown—something of genuine value that, while interesting today, may prove useful tomorrow. This echoes the familiar maxim: "Keep a thing for seven years, and you will find the use of it."

Consider a man who has lost a title-deed—a document that would decide a legal suit in his favor. With what urgency does he search! How he ransacks the house: "My dear, have you seen that roll of paper with a great red seal?" His wife searches every drawer, every trunk, every closet, even beneath the carpets. Both search night and day, retracing the same places twenty times, saying, "Perhaps I did not look thoroughly." They cannot abandon the search. The man almost weeps—so much depends upon it. When at last he finds it, he declares, "I would rather have had my house burned than not to have found this paper."

When men and women search for virtues in their souls with such intensity, do you suppose they will say, "Perhaps others may live a good Christian life, but I cannot"? You can. When your soul hungers for true religion, when you cry after it as earnestly as one searches for a lost deed, you will find it.