Wisdom from C.S. Lewis: Moral Choices and Why We Can't Accurately Judge

From C. S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, Book III, Christian Behaviour, "Morality and Psychoanalysis":

     People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, "If you keep 
     a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the other thing." I do not think that is the 
     best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice you are 
     turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different 
     from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, 
     all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into 
     a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other 
     creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and 
     with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven: that is, it is 
     joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, 
     rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is progressing to the 
     one state or the other.
          That explains what always used to puzzle me about Christian writers; they seem to be so 
     very strict at one moment and so very free and easy at another. They talk about mere sins of 
     thought as if they were immensely important: and then they talk about the most frightful 
     murders and treacheries as if you had only got to repent and all would be forgiven. But I have 
     come to see that they are right. What they are always thinking of is the mark which the action 
     leaves on that tiny central self which no one sees in this life but which each of us will have to 
     endure--or enjoy--for ever. One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of 
     thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at. But 
     the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to 
     himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time 
     he is tempted, and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he 
     seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again: each is, 
     in the long run, doomed if he will not. The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the 
     outside, is not what really matters.  
          One last point. Remember that, as I said, the right direction leads not only to peace but to 
     knowledge. 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. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while 
     you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: 
     while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of 
     drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both 
     good and evil: bad people do not know about either.

In Christ,

Teopile/Theophilos Porter