Mere Christianity

by C.S. Lewis

The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian ‘denominations’.

There is no mystery about my own position. I am a very ordinary layman of the Church of England, not especially ‘high’, nor especially ‘low’, nor especially anything else.

perhaps the only, service I could do for my unbelieving neighbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all times.

And secondly, I think we must admit that the discussion of these disputed points has no tendency at all to bring an outsider into the Christian fold.

There are questions at issue between Christians to which I do not think we have been told the answer.

‘What is that to thee? Follow thou Me.’

For I am not writing to expound something I could call ‘my religion’, but to expound ‘mere’ Christianity, which is what it is and what it was long before I was born and whether I like it or not.

One of the things Christians are disagreed about is the importance of their disagreements.

The Methodist thought I had not said enough about Faith, and the Roman Catholic thought I had gone rather too far about the comparative unimportance of theories in explanation of the Atonement.

And this suggests that at the centre of each there is a something, or a Someone, who against all divergencies of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice.

No man, I suppose, is tempted to every sin.

‘May not many a man who cannot believe these doctrines be far more truly a Christian, far closer to the spirit of Christ, than some who do?’ Now

If you said he was not ‘a gentleman’ you were not insulting him, but giving information.

‘Ah, but surely the important thing about a gentleman is not the coat of arms and the land, but the behaviour?

To call a man ‘a gentleman’ in this new, refined sense, becomes, in fact, not a way of giving information about him, but a way of praising him: to deny that he is ‘a gentleman’ becomes simply a way of insulting him.

As a result, gentleman is now a useless word.

Now if once we allow people to start spiritualising and refining, or as they might say ‘deepening’, the sense of the word Christian, it too will speedily become a useless word.

is not for us to say who, in the deepest sense, is or is not close to the spirit of Christ. We do not see into men’s hearts. We cannot judge, and are indeed forbidden to judge.

In calling anyone a Christian they will mean that they think him a good man.

Meanwhile, the word Christian will have been spoiled for any really useful purpose it might have served.

It is only a question of using words so that we can all understand what is being said. When a man who accepts the Christian doctrine lives unworthily of it, it is much clearer to say he is a bad Christian than to say he is not a Christian.

do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait.

And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. In plain language, the question should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?’

He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he expects the other man to know about.

Nearly always he tries to make out that what he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it does there is some special excuse.

It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever you like to call it, about which they really agreed.

Quarrelling means trying to show that the other man is in the wrong.

And there would be no sense in trying to do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and Wrong are;

The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law—with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey the Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.

This law was called the Law of Nature because people thought that every one knew it by nature and did not need to be taught

But taking the race as a whole, they thought that the human idea of decent behaviour was obvious to every one.

If they had had no notion of what we mean by right, then, though we might still have had to fight them, we could no more have blamed them for that than for the colour of their hair.

Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where a man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five.

But they have always agreed that you ought not to put yourself first. Selfishness has never been admired.

But they have always agreed that you must not simply have any woman you liked.

He may break his promise to you, but if you try breaking one to him he will be complaining ‘It’s not fair’ before you can say Jack Robinson.

if there is no Law of Nature—what is the difference between a fair treaty and an unfair one?

I am only trying to call attention to a fact; the fact that this year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practise ourselves the kind of behaviour we expect from other people.

The point is that they are one more proof of how deeply, whether we like it or not, we believe in the Law of Nature.

If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently?

The truth is, we believe in decency so much—we feel the Rule of Law pressing on us so—that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and conse...

First, that human beings, all over the earth, have this curious idea that they ought to behave in a certain way, and cannot really get rid of it.

Secondly, that they do not in fact behave in that way. They know the Law of Nature; they break it.

Now I do not deny that we may have a herd instinct: but that is not what I mean by the Moral Law.

But feeling a desire to help is quite different from feeling that you ought to help whether you want to or not.

You will probably feel two desires—one a desire to give help (due to your herd instinct), the other a desire to keep out of danger (due to the instinct for self-preservation).

a third thing which tells you that you ought to follow the impulse to help, and suppress the impulse to run away.

The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys.

obviously the stronger of the two must win.

You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same.