Mere Christianity

by C.S. Lewis

Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.

Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere he can be cured and made human again.

Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils.

All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.

What I cannot understand is this sort of semi-pacifism you get nowadays which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you were ashamed of it. It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the Services of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage—a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness.

Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature.

We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one’s own back, must be simply killed.

Even while we kill and punish we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves—to wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured: in fact, to wish his good.

but He has given us the sum ready worked out in our own case to show us how it works.

Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that that is how He loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves. For really there is nothing else in us to love: creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco . . .

According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride.

it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

pointed out a moment ago that the more pride one had, the more one disliked pride in others.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others.

The sexual impulse may drive two men into competition if they both want the same girl. But that is only by accident; they might just as likely have wanted two different girls. But a proud man will take your girl from you, not because he wants her, but just to prove to himself that he is a better man than you.

In God you come up against something which is in every respect immeasurably superior to yourself. Unless you know God as that—and, therefore, know yourself as nothing in comparison—you do not know God at all.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

The real test of being in the presence of God is, that you either forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to forget about yourself altogether.

The trouble begins when you pass from thinking, ‘I have pleased him; all is well,’ to thinking, ‘What a fine person I must be to have done it.’

The more you delight in yourself and the less you delight in the praise, the worse you are becoming.

He is not in the least worried about His dignity. The point is, He wants you to know Him: wants to give you Himself.

And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get into any kind of touch with Him you will, in fact, be humble—delightedly humble, feeling the infinite relief of having for once got rid of all the silly nonsense about your own dignity which has made you restless and unhappy all your life.

strutting about like the little idiots we are.

To get even near it, even for a moment, is like a drink of cold water to a man in a desert.

He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.

you think you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

It is a state not of the feelings but of the will; that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.

It means that we wish our own good. In the same way Christian Love (or Charity) for our neighbours is quite a different thing from liking or affection. We ‘like’ or are ‘fond of’ some people, and not of others. It is important to understand that this natural ‘liking’ is neither a sin nor a virtue, any more than your likes and dislikes in food are a sin or a virtue. It is just a fact.

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.

But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.

The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.

An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a ridge or railway line or bridgehead from which the enemy may launch an attack otherwise impossible.

Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.

feelings are not what God principally cares about.

But the great thing to remember is that, though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not. It is not wearied by our sins, or our indifference; and, therefore, it is quite relentless in its determination that we shall be cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.

This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.

you read history you will find that the Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.

Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.

The longings which arise in us when we first fall in love, or first think of some foreign country, or first take up some subject that excites us, are longings which no marriage, no travel, no learning, can really satisfy.

And so he settles down and learns not to expect too much and represses the part of himself which used, as he would say, ‘to cry for the moon’.

In that case it would be a pity to find out too late (a moment after death) that by our supposed ‘common sense’ we had stifled in ourselves the faculty of enjoying it.

The Christian says, ‘Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists.

If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.

must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.’

The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them.

People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.

And if he thought the evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would be merely stupid.

The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.

some moment, in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true.