God in the Dock

by C.S. Lewis

It is said that our ancestors, taking the supernatural for granted and greedy of wonders, read the miraculous into events that were really not miracles.

But there is one thing often said about our ancestors which we must not say. We must not say ‘They believed in miracles because they did not know the Laws of Nature.’ This is nonsense.

In the second place, many people confuse the laws of nature with the laws of thought and imagine that their reversal or suspension would be a contradiction in terms—as if the resurrection of the dead were the same sort of thing as two and two making five.

The miracles in fact are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see.

To think that this was a fable, a product of our own brains as they are a product of matter, would be to believe that this vast symphonic splendour had come out of something much smaller and emptier than itself.

I claim that the positive historical statements made by Christianity have the power, elsewhere found chiefly in formal principles, of receiving, without intrinsic change, the increasing complexity of meaning which increasing knowledge puts into them.

I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.

Of course, they wouldn’t call it Persecution: they’d call it ‘Compulsory re-education of the ideologically unfit’, or something like that.

I disliked very much their hymns, which I considered to be fifth-rate poems set to sixth-rate music.

If one has to choose between reading the new books and reading the old, one must choose the old: not because they are necessarily better but because they contain precisely those truths of which our own age is neglectful.

What we want is not more little books about Christianity, but more little books by Christians on other subjects—with their Christianity latent.

The bad preacher does exactly the opposite: he takes the ideas of our own age and tricks them out in the traditional language of Christianity.

that the Gospels were certainly not legends (in one sense they’re not good enough): and that if they are not history then they are realistic prose fiction of a kind which actually never existed before the eighteenth century.

If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives him no help at all.

Education is only the most fully conscious of the channels whereby each generation influences the next.

our opponents had to correct what seemed to us their almost bottomless ignorance of the Faith they supposed themselves to be rejecting.

no doctrine is, for the moment, dimmer to the eye of faith than that which a man has just successfully defended.

If He can be known it will be by self-revelation on His part, not by speculation on ours.

Hence, in all true Christian asceticism, that respect for the thing rejected which, I think, we never find in pagan asceticism.

Because we love something else more than this world we love even this world better than those who know no other.

A group of such young penitents will say, ‘Let us repent our national sins’; what they mean is, ‘Let us attribute to our neighbour (even our Christian neighbour) in the Cabinet, whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy.’

The wrong asceticism torments the self: the right kind kills the selfness.

the temptation of claiming for our favourite opinions that kind and degree of certainty and authority which really belongs only to our Faith.

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

Nothing strikes me more when I read the controversies of past ages than the fact that both sides were usually assuming without question a good deal which we should now absolutely deny.

I believe that many who find that ‘nothing happens’ when they sit down, or kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand.

By trying to translate our doctrines into vulgar speech we discover how much we understand them ourselves.

There is too much solemnity and intensity in dealing with sacred matters; too much speaking in holy tones.

I sometimes think that writing is like driving sheep down a road. If there is any gate open to the left or the right the readers will most certainly go into it.

every preference of a small good to a great, or a partial good to a total good, involves the loss of the small or partial good for which the sacrifice was made.

Perhaps civilization will never be safe until we care for something else more than we care for it.

Must we not abandon sentimental eulogies and begin to give practical advice on the high, hard, lovely, and adventurous art of really creating the Christian family?

society can mend, remake, and unmake men at its pleasure, its pleasure may, of course, be humane or homicidal. The difference is important. But, either way, rulers have become owners.

Hence the new name ‘leaders’ for those who were once ‘rulers’.