Wisdom from C.S. Lewis: The Hard and Easy Yoke

C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, Book IV, Beyond Personality, "Is Christianity Hard or Easy?":

          In the last chapter we were considering the Christian idea of "putting on Christ," or first 

     "dressing up" as a son of God in order that you may finally become a real son. What I want 

     to make clear is that this is not one among many jobs a Christian has to do; and it is not a 

     sort of special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of Christianity. Christianity offers 

     nothing else at all. And I should like to point out how it differs from ordinary ideas of 

     "morality" and "being good."

          The ordinary idea which we all have before we become Christians is this. We take as 

     starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and interests. We then admit that 

     something else--call it "morality" or "decent behaviour," or "the good of society"--has claims 

     on this self: claims which interfere with its own desires. What we mean by "being good" is 

     giving in to those claims. Some of the things the ordinary self wanted to do turn out to be 

     what we call "wrong": well, we must give them up. Other things, which the self did not want to 

     do, turn out to be what we call "right": well, we shall have to do them. But we are hoping all 

     the time that when all the demands have been met, the poor natural self will still have some 

     chance, and some time, to get on with its own life and do what it likes. In fact, we are very 

     like an honest man paying his taxes. He pays them all right, but he does hope that there will 

     be enough left over for him to live on. Because we are still taking our natural self as the 

     starting point.

          As long as we are thinking that way, one or other of two results is likely to follow. Either 

     we give up trying to be good, or else we become very unhappy indeed. For, make no 

     mistake: if you are really going to try to meet all the demands made on the natural self, it will 

     not have enough left over to live on. The more you obey your conscience, the more your 

     conscience will demand of you. And your natural self, which is thus being starved and 

     hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier and angrier. In the end, you will either 

     give up trying to be good, or else become one of those people who, as they say, "live for 

     others" but always in a discontented, grumbling way--always wondering why the others do 

     not notice it more and always making a martyr of yourself. And once you have become that 

     you will be a far greater pest to anyone who has to live with you than you would have been if 

     you had remained frankly selfish.

          The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says "Give me All. I don't want 

     so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You. I 

     have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good. I 

     don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. I 

     don't want to drill the tooth, or crown it, or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole 

     natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked-the 

     whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall 

     become yours."

          Both harder and easier than what we are all trying to do. You have noticed, I expect, that 

     Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very 

     easy. He says, "Take up your Cross"--in other words, it is like going to be beaten to death in 

     a concentration camp. Next minute he says, "My yoke is easy and my burden light." He 

     means both. And one can just see why both are true.

          Teachers will tell you that the laziest boy in the class is the one who works hardest in the 

     end. They mean this. If you give two boys, say, a proposition in geometry to do, the one who 

     is prepared to take trouble will try to understand it. The lazy boy will try to learn it by heart 

     because, for the moment, that needs less effort. But six months later, when they are 

     preparing for an exam., that lazy boy is doing hours and hours of miserable drudgery over 

     things the other boy understands, and positively enjoys, in a few minutes. Laziness means 

     more work in the long run. Or look at it this way. In a battle, or in mountain climbing, there is 

     often one thing which it takes a lot of pluck to do; but it is also, in the long run, the safest 

     thing to do. If you funk it, you will find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger. The cowardly 

     thing is also the most dangerous thing.

          It is like that here. The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your 

     whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all 

     trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is to remain what we call "ourselves," to 

     keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be "good." We 

     are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way--centred on money or pleasure or 

     ambition--and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that 

     is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. 

     If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass 

     may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the 

     change must go deeper than the surface. I must be ploughed up and re-sown.

          That is why the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look 

     for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for 

     the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in 

     shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting 

     that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. And so on, all day. Standing back 

     from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.

          We can only do it for moments at first. But from those moments the new sort of life will be 

     spreading through our system: because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us. It 

     is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which 

     soaks right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When he said, "Be perfect," He 

     meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard; but the sort of 

     compromise we are all hankering after is harder--in fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for 

     an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining 

     an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an 

     ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

          May I come back to what I said before? This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing 

     else. It is so easy to get muddled about that. It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of 

     different objects--education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think 

     the State has a lot of different objects--military, political, economic, and what not. But in a 

     way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the 

     ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a 

     couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or 

     digging in his own garden--that is what the State is there for. And unless they are helping to 

     increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, 

     police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time. In the same way the Church exists for 

     nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing 

     that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste 

     of time. God became Man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the 

     whole universe was created for any other purpose. It says in the Bible that the whole 

     universe was made for Christ and that everything is to be gathered together in Him. I do not 

     suppose any of us can understand how this will happen as regards the whole universe. We 

     do not know what (if anything) lives in the parts of it that are millions of miles away from this 

     Earth. Even on this Earth we do not know how it applies to things other than men. After all, 

     that is what you would expect. We have been shown the plan only in so far as it concerns 

     ourselves.

          I sometimes like to imagine that I can just see how it might apply to other things. I think I 

     can see how the higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and 

     makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be. I can even 

     see a sense in which the dead things and plants are drawn into Man as he studies them and 

     uses and appreciates them. And if there were intelligent creatures in other worlds they might 

     do the same with their worlds. It might be that when intelligent creatures entered into Christ 

     they would, in that way, bring all the other things in along with them. But I do not know: it is 

     only a guess. 

          What we have been told is how we men can be drawn into Christ--can become part of 

     that wonderful present which the young Prince of the universe wants to offer to His Father--

     that present which is Himself and therefore us in Him. It is the only thing we were made for. 

     And there are strange, exciting hints in the Bible that when we are drawn in, a great many 

     other things in Nature will begin to come right. The bad dream will be over: it will be morning.

In Christ,

Teopile/Theophilos Porter