Mere Christianity
by C.S. Lewis
(Harper Collins, 1980)
A ‘talk’ on the radio should, I think, be as like real talk as possible, and should not sound like an essay being read aloud.
Page VII.
In this book I am not trying to convert anyone to my own position. Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.
Page VIII.
Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son.
Pages VIII-IX.
I should be very glad if people would not draw fanciful inferences from my silence on certain disputed matters.
Page IX.
I am not writing to expound something I could call ‘my religion’, but to expound ‘mere’ Christianity, which is what it is and what it was long before I was born and whether I like it or not.
Page IX.
One of the things Christians are disagreed about is the important of their disagreements.
Page X.
It is at her centre, where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if not in doctrine.
Page XII.
When a word ceases to be a term or description and becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the object: it only tells you about the speaker’s attitude to that object.
Page XIV.
It is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge. It would be wicked arrogance for us to say that any man is, or is not, a Christian.
Page XIV.
When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.
Page XV.
I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait.
Page XV.
Delivered over the air from 1942 to 1944, these speeches eventually were gathered into the book we know today as Mere Christianity.
Page XVII.
Our declaring the notion of sin to be obsolete has not diminished human suffering.
Page XVVV.
Like Soren Kierkegaard before him and his contemporary Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Lewis seeks in Mere Christianity to help us see the religion with fresh eyes, as a radical faith whose adherents might be likened to an underground group gathering in a war zone, a place where evil seems to have the upper hand, to hear messages of hope form the other side.
Page XIX.
Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are.
Page 4.
Selfishness has never been admired. Men have differed as to whether you should have one wife or four. But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.
Page 6.
If we do not believe in decent behaviour why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently?
Page 8.
The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.
Page 10.
The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts.
Page 11.
The most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of your own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs.
Page 11.
Though there are differences between the moral ideas of one time or country and those of another, the differences are not really very great - not nearly so great as most people imagine - and you can recognise the same law running through them all.
Pages 12-13.
Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better. If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality, or Christian morality to Nazi morality.
Page 13.
I have met people who exaggerate the differences, because they have not distinguished between differences of morality and differences of belief about facts.
Page 14.
It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there.
Page 15.
Decent conduct does not mean what pays each particular person at a particular moment, still, it means what pays the human race as a whole.
Page 19.
Human beings, after all, have some sense; they see that you cannot have any real safety or happiness except in a society where every one plays fair, and it is because they see this that they try to behave decently.
Page 19.
We want to know whether the universe simply happens to be what it is for no reason or whether there is a power behind it that makes it what it is. Since that power, if it exists, would be not one of the observed facts but a reality which makes them, no mere observation of the facts can find it.
Page 24.
If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe - no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way. And that is just what we do find inside ourselves.
Page 24.
The only packet I am allowed to open is Man. When I do, especially when I open that particular man called Myself, I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way.
Page 25.
You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.
Page 29.
God is the only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from.
Page 31.
Christianity tells people to repent and promises them forgiveness. It therefore has nothing (as far as I know) to say to people who do not know they have done anything to repent of and who do not feel that they need any forgiveness.
Page 31.
I quite agree that the Christian religion is, in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort.
Page 32.
If you are a Christian you do not have to believe that all the other religions are simply wrong all through.
Page 35.
People who all believe in God can be divided according to the sort of God they believe in.
Page 36.
If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of god. But of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that. You must believe that God is separate from the world and that some of the things we see in it are contrary to His will.
Page 37.
In the very act of trying to prove that God did not exist - in other words, that the whole of reality was senseless - I found I was forced to assume that one part of reality - namely my idea of justice - was full of sense. Consequently atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning.
Pages 38-39.
It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all, real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not.
Page 40.
People put up a version of Christianity suitable for a child of six and make that the object of their attack.
Page 41.
Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could not have guessed.
Page 41.
Wickedness, when you examine it, turns out to be the pursuit of some good in the wrong way.
Page 44.
Do you now begin to see why Christianity has always said that the devil is a fallen angel? That is not a mere story for the children. It is a real recognition of the fact that evil is a parasite, not an original thing.
Page 45.
If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
Page 48.
But there is a difficulty about disagreeing with God. He is the source from which all your reasoning power comes: you could not be right and He wrong any more than a stream can rise higher than its own source.
Page 48.
Some people think the fall of man had something to do with sex, but that is a mistake. (The story in the Book of Genesis rather suggests that some corruption in our sexual nature followed the fall and was its result, not its cause.) What Satan put into the heads of our remote ancestors was the idea that they could ‘be like gods’ - could set up on their own as if they had created themselves - be their own masters - invent some sort of happiness for themselves outside God, apart from God. And out of the hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
Page 49.
A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg - or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.
Page 52.
The central Christian belief is that Christ’s death has somehow put us right with God and given us a fresh start.
Page 54.
We believe that the death of Christ is just that point in history at which something absolutely unimaginable from outside shows through into our own world.
Page 55.
A man can accept what Christ has done without knowing how it works.
Page 55.
Repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means killing part of yourself, undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here comes the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it.
Pages 56-57.
This repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like.
Page 57.
We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it.
Page 57.
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 60.
There are three things that spread the Christ-life to us: baptism, belief, and that mysterious action which different Christians call by different names - Holy communion, the Mass, the Lord’s Supper.
Page 61.
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 61.
Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority.
Page 62.
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 62.
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 63.
The Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ-life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.
Page 63.
The truth is God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do 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 64.
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 65.
Moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations.
Page 69.
Every moral failure is going to cause trouble, probably to others and certainly to yourself.
Page 71.
There are two ways in which the human machine goes wrong. One is when human individuals drift apart from one another, or else collide with one another and do one another damage, by cheating or bullying. The other is when things go wrong inside the individual - when the different parts of him (his different faculties and desires and so on) either drift apart or interfere with one another.
Page 71.
If we are to think about morality, we must think of all three departments: relations between man and man: things inside each man: and relations between man and the power that made him. … It is dealing with the third that the main differences between Christian and non-Christian morality come out.
Page 75.
Because Christ said we could only get into His world by being like children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are ‘good’, it does not matter being a fool. But that is a misunderstanding.
Page 77.
It is … quite true that God will not love you any the less, or have less use for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain. He has room for people with very little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have.
Page 77.
Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.
Page 78.
It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion.
Page 78.
One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up.
Page 78.
Justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on in law courts.
Page 79.
The truth is that right actions done for the wrong reason do not help to build the internal quality or character called a ‘virtue’.
Page 80.
We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.
Page 80.
The point is not that God will refuse you admission to His eternal world if you have not got certain qualities of character: the point is that if people have not got at least the beginnings of those qualities inside them, then no possible external conditions could make a ‘Heaven’ for them - that is, could make them happy with the deep, strong, unshakable kind of happiness God intends for us.
Page 81.
Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what every one, at bottom, had always known to be right. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that.
Page 82.
The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see.
Page 82.
A Christian society would be what we now call Leftist.
Page 84.
Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it called ‘busybodies’.
Page 84.
We have all departed from the total plan in different ways, and each of us wants to make out that is own modification of the original plan is the plan itself. You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian: every one is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest.
Page 85.
Charity - giving to the poor - is an essential part of Christian morality.
Page 86.
The real snag in all this drawing up of blueprints for a Christian society. Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party.
Page 87.
A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian.
Page 87.
I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God: and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him.
Page 87.
When a man makes a moral choice two things are involved. One is the act of choosing. The other is the various feelings, impulses and so on which his psychological outfit presents him with, and which are the raw material of his choice.
Page 89.
Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.
Page 91.
Sone of us who seem quite nice people may, in fat, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends.
Page 91.
Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man’s choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it.
Page 91.
When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right.
Page 93.
Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.
Page 93.
It is uncharitable to take pleasure in making other people uncomfortable.
Page 95.
Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues.
Page 95.
Before accepting sexual starvation as the cause of the strip-tease, we should have a look for evidence that there is in fact more sexual abstinence in our age than in those ages when things like the strip-tease were unknown.
Page 97.
Everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.
Page 97.
Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body - which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, or beauty and our energy.
Page 98.
We grow up surrounded by propaganda in favour of unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance.
Page 99.
Before we can be cured we must want to be cured.
Page 99.
Often what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself but jut this power of always trying again. … It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God.
Page 101.
Those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious, and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else.
Page 102.
Virtue - even attempted virtue - brings light; indulgence brings fog.
Page 102.
The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.
Pages 104-105.
If people do not believe in permanent marriage, it is perhaps better that they should live together unmarried than that they should make vows they do not mean to keep.
Page 106.
The idea that ‘being in love’ is the only reason for remaining married really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all. If love is the whole thing, then, the promise can add nothing; and if it adds nothing, then it should not be made.
Page 107.
The promise, made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love.
Page 107.
Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called ‘being in love’ usually does not last.
Pages 108-109.
‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables then to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.
Page 109.
The dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest.
Page 110.
It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go - let it die away - go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow - and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time.
Page 111.
There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage: one governed by the State with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the Church with rules enforced by her on her own members.
Page 112.
The relations of the family to the outer world - what might be called its foreign policy - must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. … He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife.
Pages 113-114.
If we really want (but all depends on really wanting) to learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo.
Page 116.
A good many people imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not such bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are.
Page 117.
Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. … But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves.
Page 117.
Does loving you enemy mean not; punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment - even to death. If you h ad committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.
Page 118.
War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken.
Page 119.
We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it.
Page 120.
Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves - to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him: wishing his good, not feeling fond of him nor saying he is nice when he is not.
I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them.
Page 120.
According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.
Page 121.
It was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
Page 122.
Pride is essentially competitive. … Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.
Page 122.
The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began.
Pages 123-124.
Pride always means enmity - it is enmity. And not only enmity between man and man, but enmity to God.
Page 124.
As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
Page 124.
The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.
Page 125.
Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
Page 125.
The real black, diabolical Pride, comes when you look down on others so much that you do not care what they think of you.
Page 126.
The devil loves ‘curing’ a small fault by giving you a great one.
Page 127.
To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin.
Page 127.
If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.
Page 128.
Love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.
Page 129.
It is … 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 130.
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 131.
The more cruel you are, the more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more cruel you will become - and so on in a vicious circle for ever.
Page 132.
The Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.
Page 134.
Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.
Page 134.
The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. … If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.’
Pages 136-137.
One must train the habit of Faith.
Page 141.
Daily prayers and religious readings and church-going are necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.
Page 141.
The first step towards humility was to realise that one is proud.
Page 141.
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
Page 142.
Bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in. we never find out the strength of the evil impulse inside us until we try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means - the only complete realist.
Page 142.
Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His service you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already.
Page 143.
Whenever you find any statement in Christian writings which you can make noting of, do not worry. Leave it alone. There will come a day, perhaps years later, when you suddenly see what it meant.
Page 144.
What God cares about is not exactly our actions. What he cares about his 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 145.
If you are right with Him you will inevitably be right with all your fellow-creatures.
Page 145.
The road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying harder and harder.
Page 146.
When the most important things in our life happen we quite often do not know, at the moment, what is going on.
Page 146.
No temptation is ever overcome until we stop trying to overcome it.
Page 147.
Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with God.
Page 154.
If you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones - bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas.
Page 155.
Christianity claims to be telling us about another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see.
Page 156.
Everything God has made has some likeness to Himself.
Page 158.
When we come to man, the highest of the animals, we get the completest resemblance to God which we know of. (There maybe creatures in other worlds who are more like God than man is, but we do not know about them)
Page 158.
What God the Father begets is God, something of the same kind as Himself.
Page 160.
It is only the Christians who have any idea of how human souls can be taken into the life of God and yet remain themselves … The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God.
Page 161.
When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, H shows much more of Himself to some people than to others - not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.
Page 164.
The instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred.
Pages 164-165.
The one really adequate instrument for learning about God is the whole Christian community, waiting for Him together.
Page 165.
Almost certainly God is not in Time. His life does not consist of moments following one another.
Page 167.
We must think of the Son always … streaming forth from the Father, like light from a lamp, or heat from a fire, or thoughts from a mind. He is the self-expression of the Father - what the Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it.
Pages 173-174.
Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love. Of course, what these people mean when they say that God is love is often something quite different: they really mean ‘Love is God’. They really mean that our feelings of love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they produce, are to be treated with great respect. Perhaps they are: but that is something quite different from what Christians mean by the statement ‘God is love’. They believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has crated everything else.
Pages 174-175.
What grows out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God.
Page 175.
If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.
Page 176.
Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?
Page 176.
The whole offer which Christianity means is this: that we can, if we let god have His way, come to share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God.
Page 177.
Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.
Page 177.
The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.
Page 178.
If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would not look like a lot of separate things dotted about. It would look like one single growing thing - rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other.
Page 180.
God is no one but Himself and what He does is like nothing else. You could hardly expect it to be otherwise.
Page 181.
Humanity is already ‘saved’ in principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation.
Page 181.
One of our own race has this new life: if we get close to Him we shall catch it from Him.
Page 181.
Do not start quarrelling with other people because they use a different formula from yours.
Page 182.
The process of being turned from a creature into a son would not have been difficult or painful if the human race had not turned away form God centuries ago.
Page 183.
God - i.e. … the rock bottom, irreducible Fact on which all other facts depend.
Page 184.
Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body - different from one another and each contributing what no other could.
Page 185.
A Christian must not be either a Totalitarian or and Individualist.
Page 186.
That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs - pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.
Page 186.
Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already.
Page 188.
Men are mirrors, or ‘carriers’ of Christ to other men.
Page 190.
Never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world.
Page 191.
After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God.
Page 193.
It is God who does everything. We, at most, allow it to be done to us.
Page 193.
God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one.
Page 193.
The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you.
Page 196.
Laziness means more work in the long run.
Page 197.
The real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it.
Page 198.
The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs.
Page 199.
God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.
Page 203.
The question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what He intended us to be when He made us. He is the inventor, we are only the machine.
Page 203.
We may be content to remain what we call ‘ordinary people’: but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility: it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania: it is obedience.
Page 204.
We must never imagine that our own unaided effort can be relied on to carry us even through the next twenty-four hours as ‘decent’ people.
Page 204.
Those who put themselves in His hands will become perfect, as He is perfect - perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, and immortality. The change will not be completed in this life, for death is an important part of the treatment.
Page 207.
If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man’s outward actions - if he continues to be just as snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before - then I think we must suspect that his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary.
Page 207.
When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.
Page 208.
If Christianity is true then it ought to follow (a) That any Christian will be nicer than the same person would be if he were not a Christian. (b) That any man who becomes a Christian will be nicer than he was before.
Page 210.
It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things: but to convert rebellious wills cost His crucifixion.
Page 212.
The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.
Page 213.
Mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine.
Page 216.
What can you ever really know of other people’s souls - of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles?
Pages 216-217.
I should expect the next stage in Evolution not to be a stage in Evolution at all: should expect that Evolution itself as a method of producing change will be superseded. And finally, I should not be surprised if, when the thing happened, very few people noticed that it was happening.
Page 220.
The new step, the step from being creatures to being sons, is voluntary. … It is voluntary in the sense that when it is offered to us, we can refuse it.
Page 221.
Until we rise and follow Christ we are still parts of Nature, still in the womb of our great mother. Her pregnancy has been long and painful and anxious, but it has reached its climax.
Page 222.
We must get over wanting to be needed: in some goodish people, specially women, that is the hardest of all temptations to resist.
Page 223.
The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.
Page 225.
Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.
Page 226.