The quest for beauty

My theological studies have taken me away from doing much blogging, but every now and then they offer up a quote I need to pass on.  Such is this, coming by way of Alister McGrath’s Christian Theology: An Introduction, it is actually a quote from a C. S. Lewis sermon entitled “The Weight of Glory”:

“The books or the music in which we thought the beauty was located will betray us if we trust to them; it was not in them, it only came through them, and what came through them was longing.  These things — the beauty, the memory of our own past — are good images of what we really desire; but if they are mistaken for the thing itself they turn into dumb idols, breaking the hearts of their worshippers.  For they are not the thing itself; they are only the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have not visited.”