The Testimony of Malcom Muggeridge

"I may, I suppose, regard myself, or pass for being, a relatively successful man. People occasionally stare at me in the streets - that's fame. I can fairly easily earn enough to qualify for admission to the higher slopes of the Inland Revenue [i.e. the British IRS] - that's success. Furnished with money and a little fame even the elderly, if they care to, may partake of trendy diversions - that's pleasure. It might happen once in a while that something I said or wrote was sufficiently heeded for me to persuade myself that it represented a serious impact on our time - that's fulfillment. Yet I say to you, and I beg you to believe me, multiply these tiny triumphs by a million, add them all together, and they are nothing - less than nothing, a positive impediment - measured against one draught of that living water Christ offers to the spiritually thirsty, irrespective of who or what they are. What, I ask myself, does life hold, what is there in the works of time, in the past, now and to come, which could possibly be put in the balance against the refreshment of drinking that water?" (quoted in D.A. Carson, The God Who Is There, pp. 148-49).