Love of the Truth

“I think we’ve got to ask Almighty God to give us more love, much more love, of his truth for its own sake. Loving the truth isn’t the same thing as arguing about it; when we argue, we are so bent on getting the other person to see our point of view that we hardly mind whether it is true or not; we become advocates. Loving the truth isn’t the same thing as preaching it or writing about it; when we preach it or write about it we are too much concerned with making it clear, with getting it across, to appreciate it in its own nature. Loving the truth isn’t even the same thing as studying it, or meditating about it; when we study it, we are out to master it; when we meditate about it, we are using it as a lever which will help us to get a move on with the business of our own souls. No, we have got to love the truth with a jealous, consuming love that can’t rest satisfied until it has won the allegiance of every sane man and woman on God’s earth. And we don’t, very often, love it like that. We are God’s spoiled children; his truth drops into your lap like a ripe fruit-Open thy mouth wide, he says, and I will fill it. There is a sense, you know, in which the false thinkers of to-day love the truth better than Christians do. Their fancied truth is something they have earned by their own labours, and they appreciate it more than we appreciate the real truth which has dropped into our laps.

The truth of which we are speaking is not a set of abstract propositions, however august. We are to love the truth as it is in Christ; he himself is truth incarnate, and we call upon every human mind to surrender to his service. Every human mind, and our own minds first; but it must be a real intellectual surrender. We are to preach the gospel, not as a mere recipe which we have tried and found useful, not as a mere pattern of living which we have learned to admire, but as truth, which has a right to be told; which would still have to be told, even if no heaven beckoned from above, no hell yawned beneath us. If we really loved the truth, then perhaps it would bite deeper into our minds, become realized and operative, not a mere set of formulas, which we accept with a shrug of the shoulders. And then perhaps we should recapture that spirit of faith, in which the men who went before us moved the world.”

~Ronald Knox