A Year with C. S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works

by C.S. Lewis

If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness. And it appears, from all the records, that though He has often rebuked us and condemned us, He has never regarded us with contempt. He has paid us the intolerable compliment of loving us, in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense.

Our highest activity must be response, not initiative. To experience the love of God in a true, and not an illusory form, is therefore to experience it as our surrender to His demand, our conformity to His desire: to experience it in the opposite way is, as it were, a solecism against the grammar of being.

God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.

You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.

To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.

God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.

Viewing the Remains You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all [Matthew 25:34, 41]. To enter heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter hell, is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into hell is not a man: it is ‘remains’. To be a complete man means to have the passions obedient to the will and the will offered to God: to have been a man—to be an ex-man or ‘damned ghost’—would presumably mean to consist of a will utterly centred in its self and passions utterly uncontrolled by the will. —from The Problem of Pain