An excerpt from The Great Divorce

I'm currently reading C.S Lewis' The Great Divorce, which is an allegorical novel about one man's experience of Heaven and Hell. The main character, who has not yet been named (I'm only about halfway), boards a bus and meets a plethora of supernatural beings and finds himself in a beautiful forest (a place like Narnia perhaps--minus the talking wildlife). Here he learns that there are significant consequences for living life apart from knowing Christ. He realizes this through encounters with other spiritual beings, who seem to be abounding in peace and joy, whilst he and his other bus-mates, find themselves struggling to enjoy the scenery due to the local plant life wreaking havoc on their ghost-like bodies. The following excerpt I found particularly profound. The main character is eavesdropping on a White Spirit trying to tell another ghost, one who calls himself a skeptic of the resurrection of Christ, that it has come to a point for the skeptic to either give up his endless search for truth (for he confidently suggests that there is no end to his thirst for knowledge), or choose to live the futility of his quest in Hell:

"Listen!" said the White Spirit. "Once you were a child. Once you knew what inquiry was for. There was a time when you asked questions because you wanted answers, and were glad when you had found them. Become that child again: even now."

"Ah, but when I became a man I put away childish things."

"You have gone far wrong. Thirst was made for water; inquiry for truth. What you now call the free play of inquiry has neither more nor less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given you than masturbation has to do with marriage."