How To Be A Christian
by C.S. Lewis
Ed. by Michael G. Maudlin
(London: William Collins, 2018)
Christian faith becomes real when it is lived out.
Page XI.
Christians need to grapple with beliefs before we understand that we are empowered by Jesus to live in a new way.
Page XII.
What God cares about is not exactly our actions. What he cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind or quality - the kind of creatures He intended us to be - creatures related to Himself in a certain way.
Page 1.
When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on.
Page 3.
You may say that no temptation is ever overcome until we stop trying to overcome it.
Page 5.
If what you call your ‘faith’ in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what He says, then it is not Faith at all - not faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory about him.
Page 7.
Before I became a Christian I do not think I fully realised that one’s life, after conversion, would inevitably consist in doing most of the same things one had been doing before, one hopes, in a new spirit, but still the same things.
Page 12.
Christianity does not exclude any of the ordinary human activities.
Page 15.
All our merely natural activities will be accepted, if they are offered to God, even the humblest, and all of them, even the noblest, will be sinful if they are not.
Page 16.
I reject at once an idea which lingers in the mid of some modern people that cultural activities are in their own right spiritual and meritorious - as though scholars and poets were intrinsically more pleasing to God than scavengers and bootblacks.
Page 17.
God has made it a rule for Himself that He won’t alter people’s character by force. He can and will alter them - but only if the people will let Him.
Page 25.
He would rather have a world of free beings, with all its risks, than a world of people who did right like machines because they couldn’t do anything else.
Page 25.
A perpetual excitement of hope about the Second Coming is impossible. … Crisis-feeling of any sort is essentially transitory. Feelings come and go, and when they come a good use can be made of them: they cannot be our regular spiritual diet.
Page 38.
What death is to each man, the Second Coming is to the whole human race.
Page 39.
What modern Christians find it harder to remember is that the whole life of humanity in this world is also precarious, temporary, provisional.
Page 39.
We believe that God forgives us our sins: but also that He will not do so unless we forgive other people their sins against us.
Page 46.
There is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing.
Page 47.
If one was not really to blame then there is nothing to forgive. In that sense forgiveness and excusing are almost opposites.
Page 47.
If you had a perfect excuse, you would not need forgiveness.
Page 47.
The trouble is that what we call “asking God’s forgiveness” very often really consists in asking God to accept our excuses.
Page 48.
A great deal of our anxiety to make excuses comes from not really believing in it, from thinking that God will not take us to Himself again unless He is satisfied that some sort of case can be made out in our favour
Page 49.
Real forgiveness means looking steadily at the sin, the sin that is left over without any excuse, after all allowances have been made, and seeing it in all its horror dirt, meanness, and malice, and nevertheless being wholly reconciled to the man who has done it.
Pages 49-50.
Forgiving does not mean excusing. Many people seem to think it does.
Page 50.
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
Page 51.
The self can be regarded in two ways. One the one hand, it is God’s creature, an occasion of love and rejoicing. … On the other hand, it is that one self of all others which is called I and me, and which on that ground puts forward an irrational claim to preference.
Pages 55-56.
The wrong asceticism torments the self: the right kind Kills the selfness. We must die daily: but it is better to love the self than to love nothing, and to pity the self than to pity no one.
Page 57.
I define Faith as the power of continuing to believe what we once honestly thought to be true until cogent reasons for honestly changing our minds are brought before us.
Page 59.
The society of unbelieves makes Faith harder even when they are people whose opinions, on any other subject, are known to be worthless.
Page 60.
Our faith in Christ wavers not so much when real arguments come against it as when it looks improbable.
Page 62.
There is nothing we cannot be made to believe or disbelieve. If we wish to be rational, not now and then, but constantly, we must pray for the gift of Faith, for the power to go on believing not in the teeth or reason but in the teeth of lust and terror and jealousy and boredom and indifference that which reason, authority, or experience, or all three, have once delivered to us for truth.
Page 63.
If Christian teachers wish to recall Christian people to domesticity - and I, for one, believe that people must be recalled to it - the first necessity is to stop telling lies about home life and to substitute realistic teaching.
Page 69.
Charity begins at home: so does uncharity.
Page 71.
What chiefly distinguishes domestic from public conversation is surely very often simply its downright rudeness. What distinguishes domestic behaviour is often its selfishness, slovenliness, incivility - even brutality. And it will often happen that those who praise home life most loudly are the worst offenders in this respect: they praise it - they are always glad to get home, hate the outer world, can’t stand visitors, can’t be bothered meeting people, etc. - because the freedoms in which they indulge themselves at home have ended by making them unfit for civilized society.
Page 73.
If the home is to be a means of grace it must be a place of rules. There cannot be a common life without a regula. The alternative to rule is not freedom but the unconstitutional (and often unconscious) tyranny of the most selfish member.
Page 74.
The Christian belief is that if we somehow share the humility and suffering of Christ we shall also share in His conquest of death and find a new life after we have died and in it become perfect, and perfectly happy, creatures.
Page 77.
In Christ a new kind of man appeared: and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us.
Page 78.
We have to take reality as it comes to us: there is no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or what we should have expected it to be like.
Page 80.
Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine percent of the things you believe are believed on authority.
Page 80.
A man who jibbed at authority in other things as some people do in religion would have to be content to know nothing all his life.
Page 81.
A Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble - because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.
Page 82.
The Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him.
Page 82.
The whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts.
Page 83.
He likes matter. He invented it.
Page 84.
We … know that no man can be saved except through Christ; we do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him.
Page 84.
Christians are Christ’s body, the organism through which He works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more.
Page 84.
I wonder whether people who ask god to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realise what it will be like when He does. When that happens it is the end of the world.
Page 85.
There lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith.
Page 92.
If we are made for heaven, the desire for our proper place will be already in us.
Page 96.
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.
Page 98.
Almost all our modern philosophies have been devised to convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.
Pages 98-99.
We remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy.
Page 100.
Heaven is, by definition, outside our experience, but all intelligible descriptions must be of things within our experience. The scriptural picture of heaven is therefore just as symbolical as the picture which our desire, unaided, invents for itself; heaven is not really full of jewellery any more than it is really the beauty of Nature, or a fine piece of music. The difference is that the scriptural imagery has authority. It comes to us from writers who were closer to god than we, and it has stood the test of Christian experience down the centuries.
Page 101.
If our religion is something objective, then we must never avert our eyes from those elements in it which seem puzzling or repellent; for it will be precisely the puzzling or the repellent which conceals what we do not yet know and need to know.
Page 102.
The promises of Scripture may very roughly be reduced to five heads. It is promised (1) that we shall be with Christ; (2) that we shall be like Him; (3) with an enormous wealth of imagery, that we shall have ‘glory’; (4) that we shall, in some sense, be fed or feasted or entertained; and (5) that we shall have some sort of official position in the universe - ruling cities, judging angels, being pillars of God’s temple.
Page 102.
Perfect humility dispenses with modesty.
Pages 106-107.
Glory means good rapport with god, acceptance by God, response, acknowledgement, and welcome into the heart of things.
Page 110.
Nature is mortal; we shall outlive her. When all the suns and the nebulae have passed away, each one of you will still be alive. Nature is only the image, the symbol.
Page 114.
The body was made for the Lord.
Page 115.
There are no ordinary people.
Page 116.
Wherever there is real progress in knowledge, there is some knowledge that is not superseded.
Page 119.
I claim that the positive historical statements made by Christianity have the power, elsewhere found chiefly in formal principles, of receiving, without intrinsic change, the increasing complexity of meaning which increasing knowledge puts into them.
Page 120.
The mental image which attend the act of belief are inessential.
Page 120.
As regards material reality, we are now being forced to the conclusion that we know nothing about it save its mathematics.
Page 122.
What God is in Himself, how He is to be conceived by philosophers, retreats continually from our knowledge.
Page 123.
It is religion itself - prayer and sacrament and repentance and adoration - which is here, in the long run our sole avenue to the real.
Page 123.
No possible complexity which we can give to our picture of the universe can hide us from God.
Page 124.
The business of life is to learn to like it. That is the first and great commandment.
Page 124.
Charity means ‘Love, in the Christian sense.’
Page 125.
Our love for ourselves does not mean that we like ourselves. It means that we wish our own good. In the same way Christian Loge (or Charity) for our neighbours is quite a different thing from liking or affection.
Page 126.
It is also necessary to keep a very sharp look-out for fear our liking for some one person makes us uncharitable, or even unfair, to someone else.
Page 127.
Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did.
Page 127.
When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more.
Page 128.
The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on - including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.
Page 129.
The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become.
Page 129.
Good and evil both increase at compound interest.
Page 129.
On the whole, God’s love for us is a much safer subject to think about than our love for Him.
Page 130.
Feelings are not what God principally cares about.
Page 130.
If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandment, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if He pleases.
Page 130.
The great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not.
Page 131.
Christianity is already institutional in the earliest of its documents.
Page 133.
The idea that religion belongs to our private life - that it is, in fact, an occupation for the individual’s hour of leisure - is at once paradoxical, dangerous, and natural.
Pages 133-134.
We live … in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy, and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship.
Page 135.
The Christian is called not to individualism but to membership in the mystical body.
Page 139.
The modern notion that children should call their parents by their Christian names is … perverse. For this is an effort to ignore the difference in kind which makes for real organic unity.
Page 142.
The society into which the Christian is called at baptism is not a collective but a Body.
Page 143.
Obedience is the road to freedom, humility the road to pleasure, unity the road to personality.
Page 144.
God is no accepter of persons; His love for us is not measured by our social rank or our intellectual talents.
Page 145.
I do not believe that God created an egalitarian world. I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast.
Pages 145-146.
Theocracy has been rightly abolished not because it is bad that learned priests should govern ignorant laymen, but because priests are wicked men like the rest of us.
Page 146.
The function of equality is purely protective. It is medicine, not food. By treating human persons (in judicious defiance of the observed facts) as if they were all the same kind of thing, we avoid innumerable evils.
Page 147.
Authority exercised with humility and obedience accepted with delight are the very lines along which our spirits live.
Page 148.
The Christian life defends the single personality from the collective, to by isolating him but by giving him the status of an organ in the mystical Body.
Page 149.
The Church will outlive the universe; in it the individual person will outlive the universe.
Page 149.
In fact … the value of the individual does not lie in him. He is capable of receiving value.
Page 153.
I have wanted to try to expel that quite un-Christian worship of the human individual simply as such which is so rampant in modern thought side by side with our collectivism, for one error begets the opposite error and, far from neutralizing, they aggravate each other. I mean the pestilent notion (one sees it in literary criticism) that each of us starts with a treasure called ‘personality’ locked up inside him, and that to expand and express this, to guard it from interference, to be ‘original’, is the main end of life. This is Pelagian, or worse, and it defeats even itself.
Page 154.
Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained. … When worse comes to the worst, if you cannot restrain a man by any method except by trying to kill him, then a Christian must do that.
Pages 159-160.
People will find God if they consciously seek from Him the right attitude toward all unpleasant things.
Page 161.
Every single act and feeling, every experience, whether pleasant or unpleasant, must be referred to God. It means looking at everything as something that comes from Him, and always looking to Him and asking His will first, and saying: How would He wish me to deal with this?’
Page 162.
The Christian view is that men were created to be in a certain relationship to God (if we are in that relation to Him, the right relation to one another will follow inevitably).
Page 164.
What people call the cruel doctrines are really the kindest ones in the long run.
Page 165.
If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and its not so bad.
Pages 165-166.
All people, whether Christian or not, must be prepared to live a life of discomfort. It is impossible to accept Christianity for the sake of finding comfort: but the Christian tries to lay himself open to the will of God, to do what God wants him to do. You don’t know in advance whether God is going to set you to do something difficult or painful, or something that you will quite like.
Page 169.
In reality, Christianity is primarily the fulfillment of the Jewish religion, but also the fulfillment of what was vaguely hinted in all the religions at their best.
Page 170.
To assume that primitive man was exactly like the modern savage is unsound.
Page 170.
No reference to the Devil or devils is included in any Cristian Crees, and it is quite possible to be a Christian without believing in them.
Page 174.
The more a man was in the Devil’s power, the less he would be aware of it, on the principle that a man is still fairly sober as long as he knows he’s drunk.
Page 175.
If devils exist, their first aim is to give you an anesthetic - to put you off your guard. Only if that fails, do you become aware of them.
Page 175.
I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.
Pages 178-179.
Gambling ought never to be an important part of a man’s life.
Page 181.
I think it is a risk to talk about things which are not in my own makeup, because I don’t understand them.
Page 181.
Divisions between Christians are a sin and a scandal, and Christians ought at all times to be making contributions toward reunion.
Page 182.
In all the things which I have written and thought I have always struck to traditional, dogmatic positions.
Page 182.
It seems to me that the ‘extremist’ elements in every church are nearest one another and the liberal and ‘broad-minded’ people in each body could never be united at all. The world of dogmatic Christianity is a place in which thousands of people of quite different types keep on saying the same thing, and the world of ‘broad-mindedness’ and watered-down ‘religion’ is a world where a small number of people (all of the same type) say totally different things and change their minds every few minutes.
Pages 182-183.
I detest every kind of religious compulsion.
Page 184.
If there is anything in the teaching of the New Testament which is in the nature of a command, it is that you are obliged to take the Sacrament, and you can’t do it without going to church.
Page 185.
We are not always aware of things at the time they happen.
Page 186.