God in the Dock

by C.S. Lewis

I may have made theological errors. My manner may have been defective. Others may do better hereafter. I am ready, if I am young enough, to learn.

a more helpful critic if he advised a cure as well as asserting many diseases. How does he himself do such work?

The first and fatal charm of national repentance is, therefore, the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing—but, first, of denouncing—the conduct of others.

All Christians know that they must forgive their enemies. But ‘my enemy’ primarily means the man whom I am really tempted to hate and traduce.

Is it not, then, the duty of the Church to preach national repentance? I think it is. But the office—like many others—can be profitably discharged only by those who discharge it with reluctance.

The hard sayings of our Lord are wholesome to those only who find them hard.

We must not explain this apparent contradiction by saying that self-love is right up to a certain point and wrong beyond that point. The question is not one of degree. There are two kinds of self-hatred which look rather alike in their earlier stages, but of which one is wrong from the beginning and the other right to the end.

Now, the self can be regarded in two ways. On the one hand, it is God’s creature, an occasion of love and rejoicing; now, indeed, hateful in condition, but to be pitied and healed. On the other hand, it is that one self of all others which is called I and me, and which on that ground puts forward an irrational claim to preference. This claim is to be not only hated, but simply killed; ‘never’, as George MacDonald says, ‘to be allowed a moment’s respite from eternal death’.

The very self-love which he has to reject is to him a specimen of how he ought to feel to all selves; and he may hope that when he has truly learned (which will hardly be in this life) to love his neighbour as himself, he may then be able to love himself as his neighbour: that is, with charity instead of partiality.

We must die daily: but it is better to love the self than to love nothing, and to pity the self than to pity no one.

The Christian Party must either confine itself to stating what ends are desirable and what means are lawful, or else it must go further and select from among the lawful means those which it deems possible and efficacious and give to these its practical support.

that temptation which the Devil spares none of us at any time—the temptation of claiming for our favourite opinions that kind and degree of certainty and authority which really belongs only to our Faith.

The danger of mistaking our merely natural, though perhaps legitimate, enthusiasms for holy zeal, is always great.

On those who add ‘Thus said the Lord’ to their merely human utterances descends the doom of a conscience which seems clearer and clearer the more it is loaded with sin.

By the natural light He has shown us what means are lawful: to find out which one is efficacious He has given us brains. The rest He has left to us.

world where parties have to take care not to alienate Christians, instead of a world where Christians have to be ‘loyal’ to infidel parties.

He who converts his neighbour has performed the most practical Christian-political act of all.

the great man, just because of his greatness, is much more intelligible than his modern commentator.

the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet.

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.

Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books.

All contemporary writers share to some extent the contemporary outlook—even those, like myself, who seem most opposed to it.

None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books.

Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.

Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.

We are all rightly distressed, and ashamed also, at the divisions of Christendom. But those who have always lived within the Christian fold may be too easily dispirited by them.

Once you are well soaked in it, if you then venture to speak, you will have an amusing experience. You will be thought a Papist when you are actually reproducing Bunyan, a Pantheist when you are quoting Aquinas, and so forth.

the layman or amateur needs to be instructed as well as to be exhorted.

I tend to find the doctrinal books often more helpful in devotion than the devotional books, and I rather suspect that the same experience may await many others.

It is his glory that he did not move with the times; it is his reward that he now remains when those times, as all times do, have moved away.

Him who was so full of life that when He wished to die He had to ‘borrow death from others’.

It is true that we do see all round us things growing up to perfection from small and rude beginnings; but then it is equally true that the small and rude beginnings themselves always come from some full-grown and developed thing.

the perfect produces the imperfect, which again becomes perfect—egg leads to bird and bird to egg—in endless succession.

On any view, the first beginning must have been outside the ordinary processes of nature.

since the egg-bird-egg sequence leads us to no plausible beginning, is it not reasonable to look for the real origin somewhere outside sequence altogether?

You have to go outside the sequence of engines, into the world of men, to find the real originator of the Rocket. Is it not equally reasonable to look outside Nature for the real Originator of the natural order?

Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

The very subject for his inquiries from outside exists for him only because he has, at least once, been inside.

you can step outside one experience only by stepping inside another.

‘I don’t see why,’ said he. ‘The odd thing is that He should let us influence the course of events at all. But since He lets us do it in one way I don’t see why He shouldn’t let us do it in the other.’

The withdrawal of compulsion did not create a new religious situation, but only revealed the situation which had long existed.

One way of putting the truth would be that the religion which has declined was not Christianity.

When no man goes to church except because he seeks Christ the number of actual believers can at last be discovered.

mere ‘religion’—‘morality tinged with emotion’, ‘what a man does with his solitude’, ‘the religion of all good men’—has little power of resistance. It is not good at saying No.

Something of the shame of the Cross is, and ought to be, irremovable.

Conversion requires an alteration of the will, and an alteration which, in the last resort, does not occur without the intervention of the supernatural.

The propagandist, the apologist, only represents John Baptist: the Preacher represents the Lord Himself. He will be sent—or else he will not. But unless he comes we mere Christian intellectuals will not effect very much. That does not mean we should down tools.

a widespread and lively interest in a subject is precisely what we call a Fashion. And it is the nature of Fashions not to last.

Whatever in our present success mere Fashion has given us, mere Fashion will presently withdraw. The real conversions will remain: but nothing else will.

The enemy has not yet thought it worth while to fling his whole weight against us. But he soon will. This happens in the history of every Christian movement, beginning with the Ministry of Christ Himself. At first it is welcome to all who have no special reason for opposing it: at this stage he who is not against it is for it.