Usefulness— better than here capacity-Charles Spurgeon

A monstrous vat, certainly, is the great tun of heidelberg. It might hold eight hundred hogsheads of wine at the least ; but what is the use of such wasted capacity, since, for nearly a hundred years, there has not been a drop of liquor in it ! Hollow and sounding, empty and void and waste ; vintages come and go, and find it perishing of dry rot. An empty cask is not so great a spectacle after all, let its size be what it may, though old travelers called this monster one of the wonders of the world. What a thousand pities it is that many men of genius and of learning are, in respect of usefulness, no better than this huge but empty tun of heidelberg ! Very capacious are their minds, but very unpractical. Better be a poor household killdeer, and give forth one’s little freely, than exist as a useless prodigy, capable of much and available for nothing.