Wisdom from C.S. Lewis: On Forgiveness

C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, Book III, Christian Behaviour, "Forgiveness":

          I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. 

     But I am not sure I was right I believe the one I have to talk of today is even more unpopular: 

     the Christian rule, "Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself." Because in Christian morals 

     "thy neighbour" includes "thy enemy," and so we come up against this terrible duty of 

     forgiving our enemies.

          Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive, as we 

     had during [World War II]. And then, to mention the subject at all is to be greeted with howls 

     of anger. It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue: it is that they think it 

     hateful and contemptible. "That sort of talk makes them sick," they say. And half of you 

     already want to ask me, "I wonder how you'd feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a 

     Pole or a Jew?"

          So do I. I wonder very much. Just as when Christianity tells me that I must not deny my 

     religion even to save myself from death by torture, I wonder very much what I should do when 

     it came to the point. I am not trying to tell you in this book what I could do--I can do precious 

     little--I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, right in the middle of it, 

     I find "Forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us." There is no slightest 

     suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly dear that 

     if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it. What are we to 

     do?

          It is going to be hard enough, anyway, but I think there are two things we can do to make 

     it easier. When you start mathematics you do not begin with the calculus; you begin with 

     simple addition. In the same way, 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. 

     One might start with forgiving one's husband or wife, or parents or children, or the nearest 

     N.C.O., for something they have done or said in the last week. That will probably keep us 

     busy for the moment. And secondly, we might try to understand exactly what loving your 

     neighbour as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love 

     myself?

          Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for 

     myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently "Love your neighbour" 

     does not mean "feel fond of him" or "find him attractive." I ought to have seen that before, 

     because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself, think 

     myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do (and those are, no doubt, my worst 

     moments) but that is not why I love myself. In fact it, is the other way round: my self-love 

     makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my 

     enemies does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. 

     For 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. Go a step further. 

     In my most clear-sighted moments not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I 

     am a very nasty one. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. 

     So apparently I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I 

     come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad 

     man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the 

     sinner.

          For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate 

     what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one 

     man to whom I had been doing this all my life--namely myself. However much I might dislike 

     my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the 

     slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the 

     man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those 

     things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we 

     feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said 

     about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which 

     we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and 

     hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and 

     made human again.

          The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then 

     suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not 

     quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, "Thank God, even they aren't quite so 

     bad as that," or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first 

     story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second 

     then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us 

     into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that 

     wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as 

     black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything--God and our friends and ourselves 

     included--as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of 

     pure hatred.

          Now a step further. Does loving your 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 one 

     had 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 [this is C.S. Lewis' opinion; I personally do not believe the death 

     penalty anymore necessary, and cannot justify its continuation] or a Christian soldier to kill 

     an enemy. I always have thought so, ever since I became a Christian, and long before the 

     war, and I still think so now that we are at peace. It is no good quoting "Thou shalt not kill." 

     There are two Greek words: the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder. And when 

     Christ quotes that commandment He uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, 

     Mark, and Luke. And I am told there is the same distinction in Hebrew. All killing is not 

     murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery. When soldiers came to St. John the 

     Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army: 

     nor did Christ when He met a Roman sergeant-major--what they called a centurion. The idea 

     of the knight--the Christian in arms for the defence of a good cause--is one of the great 

     Christian ideas. War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think 

     he is entirely mistaken. What I cannot understand is this sort of semipacifism you get 

     nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a 

     long face and as if you were ashamed of it. It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent 

     young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the 

     natural accompaniment of courage--a kind of gaity and wholeheartedness.

          I have often thought to myself how it would have been if, when I served in the first world 

     war, I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves 

     together a moment after death. I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any 

     resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it.

          I imagine somebody will say, "Well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy's acts, and 

     punish him, and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary 

     view?" All the difference in the world. Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. 

     Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the 

     soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature. We may 

     kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we 

     must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling 

     that wants to get one's own back, must be simply killed. I do not mean that anyone can 

     decide this moment that he will never feel it any more. That is not how things happen. I mean 

     that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, year after year, all our lives long, we must 

     hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible. 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 

     saving he is nice when he is not.

          I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has 

     oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself, God intends us to 

     love all selves in the same way and for the same reason: but He has given us the sum ready 

     worked out on our own case to show us how it works. We have then to go on and apply the 

     rule to all the other selves. Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He 

     loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the 

     things called selves. For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who 

     actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco. . . . 

Unfortunately, it is true today that people hate real forgiveness.  If it benefits them, they want your forgiveness, and maybe they praise certain examples of it--but too much, and you're a "pushover."  Wasn't Christ, in His Humility on the Cross?  Too much, and you're not upholding "justice."  Was it just that Christ the Perfect died Sinless on a Cross for the sinful ones, the very ones who put Him there on the Cross (all of us, in our sins)?  No, and we are all sinners, unable to judge.  Only He can, and He knows how to best.  I remember my closest brother and friend, after the death of Osama bin Laden, posting on his Facebook page a prayer for his soul, as hard as it was to do.  People hate forgiveness, the very same sort of forgiveness that Christ showed to those who crucified Him, to all of us--and they hated his loving prayer, choosing to usurp God's Throne and judge.  It is hard not to judge when we see such things, and I am not trying to say we should look at Osama and not see sin--we should, of course, see the atrocity of his actions.  But we cannot judge the man even for this, for we truly have made ourselves worthy of the same condemnation in our sinfulness, our hatred and judgment (indeed, in the very one with which we would judge him), our pride against God, and love of all else only after ourselves.  Only through His ineffible mercy are we not destroyed.  Those on death row can't judge one another worse than themselves--they can only beg the Merciful Judge for His mercy.

In Christ,

Teopile/Theophilos Porter

Wisdom from C.S. Lewis: On Pride

C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, Book III, Christian Behaviour, "The Great Sin":


          Today I come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other 

     morals. There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world 

     loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, 

     ever imagine that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they are bad-

     tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink, or even that they are 

     cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who was not a Christian accuse himself of 

     this vice. And at the same time I have very seldom met anyone, who was not a Christian, 

     who showed the slightest mercy to it in others. There is no fault which makes a man more 

     unpopular, and no fault which We are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we 

     have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others. The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-

     Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility. You may 

     remember, when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned you that the centre of Christian 

     morals did not lie there. Well, now, we have come to the centre. According to Christian 

     teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, 

     and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: 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.

          Does this seem to you exaggerated? If so, think it over. I pointed out a moment ago that 

     the more pride one had, the more one disliked pride in others. In fact, if you want to find out 

     how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself, "How much do I dislike it when other 

     people snub me, or refuse to take any notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me, or 

     show off?" The point it that each person's pride is in competition with every one else's pride. 

     It is because I wanted to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else 

     being the big noise. Two of a trade never agree. Now what you want to get clear is that 

     Pride is essentially competitive--is competitive by its very nature--while the other vices are 

     competitive only, so to speak, by accident 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. If every one else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking 

     there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the 

     pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has 

     gone. That is why I say that Pride is essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not. 

     The sexual impulse may drive two men into competition if they both want the same girl. But 

     that is only by accident; they might just as likely have wanted two different girls. But a proud 

     man will take your girl from you, not because he wants her, but just to prove to himself that he 

     is a better man than you. Greed may drive men into competition if there is not enough to go 

     round; but the proud man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will try to 

     get still more just to assert his power. Nearly all those evils in the world which people put 

     down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result of Pride.

          Take it with money. Greed will certainly make a man want money, for the sake of a better 

     house, better holidays, better things to eat and drink. But only up to a point What is it that

     makes a man with £10,000 a year anxious to get £20,000 a year? It is not the greed for 

     more pleasure. £10,000 will give all the luxuries that any man can really enjoy. It is Pride--the 

     wish to be richer than some other rich man, and (still more) the wish for power. For, of 

     course, power is what Pride really enjoys: there is nothing makes a man feel so superior to 

     others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers. What makes a pretty girl spread 

     misery wherever she goes by collecting admirers? Certainly not her sexual instinct: that kind 

     of girl is quite often sexually frigid. It is Pride. What is it that makes a political leader or a 

     whole nation go on and on, demanding more and more? Pride again. Pride is competitive 

     by its very nature: that is why it goes on and on. If I am a proud man, then, as long as there is 

     one man in the whole world more powerful, or richer, or cleverer than I, he is my rival and my 

     enemy.

          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. Other vices may sometimes bring people 

     together: you may find good fellowship and jokes and friendliness among drunken people or 

     unchaste people. But Pride always means enmity--it is enmity. And not only enmity between 

     man and man, but enmity to God.

          In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior 

     to yourself. Unless you know God as that--and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in 

     comparison--you do not know God at all. 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.

          That raises a terrible question. How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up 

     with Pride can say they believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid 

     it means they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to be 

     nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time imagining how He 

     approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary people: that is, they pay a 

     pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out of it a pound's worth of Pride towards 

     their fellow-men. I suppose it was of those people Christ was thinking when He said that 

     some would preach about Him and cast out devils in His name, only to be told at the end of 

     the world that He had never known them. And any of us may at any moment be in this death-

     trap. Luckily, we have a test Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we 

     are good--above all, that we are better than someone else--I think we may be sure that we 

     are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil 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.

          It is a terrible thing that the worst of all the vices can smuggle itself into the very centre of 

     our religious life. But you can see why. The other, and less bad, vices come from the devil 

     working on us through our animal nature. But this does not come through our animal nature 

     at all. It comes direct from Hell. It is purely spiritual: consequently it is far more subtle and 

     deadly. For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down the simpler vices. 

     Teachers, in fact, often appeal to a boy's Pride, or, as they call it, his self-respect, to make 

     him behave decently: many a man has overcome cowardice, or lust, or ill-temper by learning 

     to think that they are beneath his dignity--that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly 

     content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he 

     is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride--just as he would be quite content to see your 

     chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual cancer: 

     it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

          Before leaving this subject I must guard against some possible misunderstandings:

          (1) Pleasure in being praised is not [inherently] Pride. The child who is patted on the back 

     for doing a lesson well, the woman whose beauty is praised by her lover, the saved soul to 

     whom Christ says "Well done," are pleased and ought to be. For here the pleasure lies not 

     in what you are but in the fact that you have pleased someone you wanted (and rightly 

     wanted) to please. The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, "I have pleased him; all 

     is well," to thinking, "What a fine person I must be to have done it." The more you delight in 

     yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming. When you 

     delight wholly in yourself and do not care about the praise at all, you have reached the 

     bottom. That is why vanity, though it is the sort of Pride which shows most on the surface, is 

     really the least bad and most pardonable sort. The vain person wants praise, applause, 

     admiration, too much and is always angling for it. It is a fault, but a childlike and even (in an 

     odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not yet completely contented with your own 

     admiration. You value other people enough to want them to look at you. You are, in fact, still 

     human. The real black, diabolical Pride comes when you look down on others so much that 

     you do not care what they think of you. Of course, it is very right, and often our duty, not to 

     care what people think of us, if we do so for the right reason; namely, because we care so 

     incomparably more what God thinks. But the Proud man has a different reason for not 

     caring. He says "Why should I care for the applause of that rabble as if their opinion were 

     worth anything? And even if their opinions were of value, am I the sort of man to blush with 

     pleasure at a compliment like some chit of a girl at her first dance? No, I am an integrated, 

     adult personality. All I have done has been done to satisfy my own ideals--or my artistic 

     conscience--or the traditions of my family--or, in a word, because I'm That Kind of Chap. If 

     the mob like it, let them. They're nothing to me." In this way real thoroughgoing Pride may act 

     as a check on vanity; for, as I said a moment ago, the devil loves "curing" a small fault by 

     giving you a great one. We must try not to be vain, but we must never call in our Pride to cure 

     our vanity; better the frying-pan than the fire.

          (2) We say in English that a man is "proud" of his son, or his father, or his school, or 

     regiment, and it may be asked whether "pride" in this sense is a sin. I think it depends on 

     what, exactly, we mean by "proud of." Very often, in such sentences, the phrase "is proud of" 

     means "has a warm-hearted admiration for." Such an admiration is, of course, very far from 

     being a sin. But it might, perhaps, mean that the person in question gives himself airs on the 

     ground of his distinguished father, or because he belongs to a famous regiment. This would, 

     clearly, be a fault; but even then, it would be better than being proud simply of himself. To 

     love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin; 

     though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and 

     admire God.

          (3) We must not think Pride is something God forbids because He is offended at it, or 

     that Humility is something He demands as due to His own dignity--as if God Himself was 

     proud. He is not in the least worried about His dignity. The point is, He wants you to know 

     Him; wants to give you Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you 

     really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble--delightedly humble, 

     feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own 

     dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life. He is trying to make you 

     humble in order to make this moment possible: trying to take off a lot of silly, ugly, fancy-

     dress in which we have all got ourselves up and are strutting about like the little idiots we 

     are. I wish I had got a bit further with humility myself: if I had, I could probably tell you more 

     about the relief, the comfort, of taking the fancy-dress off--getting rid of the false self, with all 

     its "Look at me" and "Aren't I a good boy?" and all its posing and posturing. To get even 

     near it, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.

          (4) Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call 

     "humble" nowadays: he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling 

     you that, of course, he is nobody. Probably all you will think about him is that he seemed a 

     cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him. If you do dislike 

     him it will be because you feel a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life so easily. 

     He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

          If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is 

     to realise that one is proud. And a biggish step, too. At least, nothing whatever can be done 

     before it. If you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

In Christ,

Teopile/Theophilos Porter

Wisdom from C.S. Lewis: On Faith

C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity, Book III, Christian Behaviour, "Faith [Part II]":

          I want to start by saying something that I would like everyone to notice carefully. It is this. If 

     this chapter means nothing to you, if it seems to be trying to answer questions you never 

     asked, drop it at once. Do not bother about it at all. There are certain things in Christianity 

     that can be understood from the outside, before you have become a Christian. But there are 

     a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have gone a certain distance 

     along the Christian road. These things are purely practical, though they do not look as if they 

     were. They are directions for dealing with particular cross-roads and obstacles on the 

     journey and they do not make sense until a man has reached those places. Whenever you 

     find any statement in Christian writings which you can make nothing of, do not worry. Leave 

     it alone. There will come a day, perhaps years later, when you suddenly see what it meant. If 

     one could understand it now, it would only do one harm.

          Of course all this tells against me as much as anyone else. The thing I am going to try to 

     explain in this chapter may be ahead of me. I may be thinking I have got there when I have 

     not. I can only ask instructed Christians to watch very carefully, and tell me when I go wrong; 

     and others to take what I say with a grain of salt--as something offered, because it may be a 

     help, not because I am certain that I am right.

          I am trying to talk about Faith in the second sense, the higher sense. I said last week that 

     the question of Faith in this sense arises after a man has tried his level best to practise the 

     Christian virtues, and found that he fails, and seen that even if he could he would only be 

     giving back to God what was already God's own. In other words, he discovers his 

     bankruptcy. Now, once again, 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. I do not add "and related 

     to one another in a certain way," because that is included: if you are right with Him you will 

     inevitably be right with all your fellow-creatures, just as if all the spokes of a wheel are fitted 

     rightly into the hub and the rim they are bound to be in the right positions to one another. And 

     as long as a man is thinking of God as an examiner who has set him a sort of paper to do, 

     or as the opposite party in a sort of bargain--as long as he is thinking of claims and 

     counterclaims between himself and God--he is not yet in the right relation to Him. He is 

     misunderstanding what he is and what God is. And he cannot get into the right relation until 

     he has discovered the fact of our bankruptcy.

          When I say "discovered," I mean really discovered: not simply said it parrot-fashion. Of 

     course, any child, if given a certain kind of religious education, will soon learn to say that we 

     have nothing to offer to God that is not already His own and that we find ourselves failing to 

     offer even that without keeping something back. But I am talking of really discovering this: 

     really finding out by experience that it is true.

          Now we cannot, in that sense, discover our failure to keep God's law except by trying our 

     very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try, whatever we say there will always be at 

     the back of our minds the idea that if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being 

     completely good. Thus, in one sense, the road back to God is a road of moral effort, of trying 

     harder and harder. But in another sense it is not trying that is ever going to bring us home. 

     All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, "You must do 

     this. I can't." Do not, I implore you, start asking yourselves, "Have I reached that moment?" 

     Do not sit down and start watching your own mind to see if it is coming along. That puts a 

     man quite on the wrong track. When the most important things in our life happen we quite 

     often do not know, at the moment, what is going on. A man does not always say to himself, 

     "Hullo! I'm growing up." It is often only when he looks back that he realises what has 

     happened and recognises it as what people call "growing up." You can see it even in simple 

     matters. A man who starts anxiously watching to see whether he is going to sleep is very 

     likely to remain wide awake. As well, the thing I am talking of now may not happen to every 

     one in a sudden flash--as it did to St Paul or Bunyan: it may be so gradual that no one could 

     ever point to a particular hour or even a particular year. And what matters is the nature of the 

     change in itself, not how we feel while it is happening. It is the change from being confident 

     about our own efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything for ourselves and 

     leave it to God.

          I know the words "leave it to God" can be misunderstood, but they must stay for the 

     moment. The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ: 

     trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He 

     carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself 

     and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, He will share His 

     "sonship" with us, will make us, like Himself, "Sons of God"[...] If you like to put it that way, 

     Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing. In a sense, the 

     whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer. But the difficulty is to 

     reach the point of recognising that all we have done and can do is nothing. What we should 

     have liked would be for God to count our good points and ignore our bad ones. Again, in a 

     sense, you may say that no temptation is ever overcome until we stop trying to overcome it-- 

     throw up the sponge. But then you could not "stop trying" in the right way and for the right 

     reason until you had tried your very hardest. And, in yet another sense, handing everything 

     over to Christ does not, of course, mean that you stop trying. To trust Him means, of course, 

     trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you 

     would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow 

     that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these 

     things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to 

     get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way 

     because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you.

          Christians have often disputed as to whether what leads the Christian home is good 

     actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on such a difficult question, but it 

     does seem to me like asking which blade in a pair of scissors is most necessary. A serious 

     moral effort is the only thing that will bring you to the point where you throw up the sponge. 

     Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point: and out of that Faith in 

     Him good actions must inevitably come. There are two parodies of the truth which different 

     sets of Christians have, in the past, been accused by other Christians of believing: perhaps 

     they may make the truth clearer. One set were accused of saying, "Good actions are all that 

     matters. The best good action is charity. The best kind of charity is giving money. The best 

     thing to give money to is the Church. So hand us over £10,000 and we will see you through." 

     The answer to that nonsense, of course, would be that good actions done for that motive, 

     done with the idea that Heaven can be bought, would not be good actions at all, but only 

     commercial speculations. The other set were accused of saying, "Faith is all that matters. 

     Consequently, if you have faith, it doesn't matter what you do. Sin away, my lad, and have a 

     good time and Christ will see that it makes no difference in the end." The answer to that 

     nonsense is that, 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.

          The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things together into one 

     amazing sentence. The first half is, "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling"--

     which looks as if everything depended on us and our good actions: but the second half goes 

     on, "For it is God who worketh in you"--which looks as if God did everything and we nothing. 

     I am afraid that is the sort of thing we come up against in Christianity. I am puzzled, but I am 

     not surprised. You see, we are now trying to understand, and to separate into water-tight 

     compartments, what exactly God does and what man does when God and man are working 

     together. And, of course, we begin by thinking it is like two men working together, so that 

     you could say, "He did this bit and I did that." But this way of thinking breaks down. God is 

     not like that. He is inside you as well as outside: even if we could understand who did what, I 

     do not think human language could properly express it. In the attempt to express it different 

     Churches say different things. But you will find that even those who insist most strongly on 

     the importance of good actions tell you you need Faith; and even those who insist most 

     strongly on Faith tell you to do good actions. At any rate that is as far as I go.

          I think all Christians would agree with me if I said that though Christianity seems at first to 

     be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of 

     all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of 

     those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call 

     goodness as a mirror is filled with light But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it 

     anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it 

     comes. But this is near the stage where the road passes over the rim of our world. No one's 

     eyes can see very far beyond that: lots of people's eyes can see further than mine.

In Christ,

Teopile/Theophilos Porter

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

Wisdom from C.S. Lewis: On Charity and Stewardship in Material Things

This short series will be excerpted from Mere Christianity, a book by C.S. Lewis, which was lent to me by a fellow volunteer, and which I thoroughly enjoy.  Though he was of the Anglican confession, he was very orthodox-minded and there was only one thing in the book which I could outright disagree with, as an Orthodox Christian, and one other thing which I disagreed with on his emphasis alone (both relatively minor, to bother discussing here).  It is an excellent book, intended to explain the most vital aspects of Christianity to one outside the Christian confession, looking in--but it is also, when understood as being written with that intent, a good book for any Christian.  From his chapter on "Social Morality" in Book III, Christian Behaviour:

     In the passage where the New Testament says that every one must work, it gives as a 

     reason "in order that he may have something to give to those in need." Charity--giving to the 

     poor--is an essential part of Christian morality: in the frightening parable of the sheep and the 

     goats it seems to be the point on which everything turns. Some people nowadays say that 

     charity ought to be unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we ought to be 

     producing a society in which there were no poor to give to. They may be quite right in saying 

     that we ought to produce that kind of society. But if anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you 

     can stop giving in the meantime, then he has parted company with all Christian morality. I do 

     not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give 

     more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, 

     amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our 

     own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I 

     should say they are too small There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do 

     because our charitable expenditure excludes them. I am speaking now of "charities" in the 

     common way. Particular cases of distress among your own relatives, friends, neighbours or 

     employees, which God, as it were, forces upon your notice, may demand much more: even to 

     the crippling and endangering of your own position. For many of us the great obstacle to 

     charity lies not in our luxurious living or desire for more money, but in our fear-fear of 

     insecurity. This must often be recognised as a temptation. Sometimes our pride also hinders 

     our charity; we are tempted to spend more than we ought on the showy forms of generosity 

     (tipping, hospitality) and less than we ought on those who really need our help.

          And now, before I end, I am going to venture on a guess as to how this section has 

     affected any who have read it. My guess is that there are some Leftist people among them 

     who are very angry that it has not gone further in that direction, and some people of an 

     opposite sort who are angry because they think it has gone much too far. If so, that brings us 

     right up against 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. 

     We are looking for an ally where we are offered either a Master or--a Judge. I am just the 

     same. There are bits in this section that I wanted to leave out. And that is why nothing 

     whatever is going to come of such talks unless we go a much longer way round. 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. I may repeat "Do as you would be done by" till I am black in the 

     face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbour as myself: and 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. And so, as I warned you, we are driven on to something more inward -

     driven on from social matters to religious matters. For the longest way round is the shortest 

     way home.

In Christ,

Teopile/Theophilos Porter