Reflections on the Psalms

by C.S. Lewis

How ought we to behave in the presence of very bad people? I will limit this by changing “very bad people” to “very bad people who are powerful, prosperous and impenitent”. If they are outcasts, poor and miserable, whose wickedness obviously has not “paid”, then every Christian knows the answer. Christ speaking to the Samaritan woman at the well, Christ with the woman taken in adultery, Christ dining with publicans, is our example. I mean, of course, that His humility, His love, His total indifference to the social discredit and misrepresentation He might incur are examples for us; not, Heaven knows, that any of us who was not specially qualified to do so by priesthood, age, old acquaintance, or the earnest request of the sinners themselves, could without insolence and presumption assume the least trace of His authority