Mere Christianity - C. S. Lewis

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

SECRET WIRELESS

 

“Enemy-occupied territory – that is what this world is.  Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.  When you go to church you are really listening in to the secret wireless from our friends:  that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going.”  (p. 46)

 

A POACHED EGG

 

“I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: ‘I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept His claim to be God.’  That is the one thing we must not say.  A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said, would not be a great moral teacher.  He would either be a lunatic – on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg – or else he would be the Devil of Hell.  You must make your choice.  Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse.  You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God.  But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher.  He has not left that open to us.  He did not intend to.”  (p. 52)

 

REPENTANCE — NO FUN AT ALL

 

“Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realizing that you have been on the wrong track and getting ready to start life over again from the ground floor – that is the only way out of our ‘hole.’  This process of surrender – this movement full speed astern – is what Christians call repentance.  Now repentance is no fun at all.”  (p. 56)

 

ONLY A BAD PERSON

 

“Only a bad person needs to repent:  only a good person can repent perfectly.  The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it.  The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person – and he would not need it . . . the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it.”  (p. 57)

 

BRINGING A HORSE BACK TO THE FENCE

 

“The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.”  (p. 82)

 

MORE THAN WE CAN SPARE

 

“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give.  I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare.  In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc., is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little.  If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small.  There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.”  (p. 86)

 

UNDERSTANDING THE EVIL LEFT INSIDE

 

“When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him.  When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.”  (p. 93)

 

LOVE — NOT A FEELING

 

“Love in this second sense – love as distinct from ‘being in love’ – is not merely a feeling.  It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God.  They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other.”  (p. 109)

 

LOSS OF THE THRILL

 

“What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this), it is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quiet different direction. . . It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill:  that is the very worst thing you can do.  Let the thrill go – let it die away – go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow – and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time.”  (p. 111)

 

A LOVELY IDEA

 

“Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.”  (p. 115)

 

BEING MADE HUMAN AGAIN

 

“I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life-namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. 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.” (p. 117)

 

A HUMBLE MAN

 

“Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what most people call ‘humble’ nowadays:  he will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy person, who is always telling you that, of course, he is nobody.  Probably all you will think about his is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap who took a real interest in what you said to him.”  (p. 128)

 

ONE OF THE GREAT SECRETS

 

“Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; 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. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more.”  (p. 131)

 

AIM AT HEAVEN

 

“Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.” (p. 134)

 

LAYING EGGS

 

“There is no need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the Christian hope of "Heaven" ridiculous by saying they do not want "to spend eternity playing harps." The answer to such people is that if they cannot understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of course, a merely symbolical attempt to express the inexpressible. Musical instruments are mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in the present life which most strongly suggests ecstasy and infinity. Crowns are mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity share His splendor and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it 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.” (p. 137)

 

EVERYTHING FOR NOTHING

 

“Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers everything for nothing.  In a sense, the whole Christian life consists in accepting that very remarkable offer.”  (p. 147)

 

AN ORDINARY MAN SAYING HIS PRAYERS

 

“An ordinary simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers.  He is trying to get into touch with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God -- that Christ is standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is the thing to which he is praying --the goal he is trying to reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on-the motive power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his prayers.” (p. 163)

 

INVENTING RELIGIONS

 

“If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier.  Bu it is not.  We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions.  How could we?  We are dealing with fact.  Of course, anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.” (p. 165)

 

BEYOND TIME

 

“God is not hurried along in the time-stream of this universe any more than an author is hurried along in the imaginary time of his own novel He has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. He does not have to deal with us in the mass.  You are as much alone with Him as if you were the only being He had ever created.  When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only man in the world.”  (p. 168)

 

GOD IS LOVE

 

“What these people mean when they say that God is love is often something quite different:  They really mean ‘love is God’.  They really mean that our feelings of love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they produce are to be treated with great respect.  Perhaps they are:  But that is something quite different from what Christians mean by the statement ‘God is love’.  They believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God forever and has created everything else.”  (p. 174-175)

 

THE REALLY TOUGH WORK

 

“The really tough work — the bit we could not have done for ourselves — has been done for us. We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts; it has already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves open to the one Man in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of being God, is also a real man, He will do it in us and for us. Remember what I said about "good infection." one of our own race has this new life: if we get close to Him we shall catch it from Him.” (p. 181)

 

DRESSING UP

 

“If you are interested enough to have read thus far you are probably interested enough to make a shot at saying your prayers: and, whatever else you say, you will probably say the Lord's Prayer.  Its very first words are “Our Father.” Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ . . . Now, the moment you realize "Here I am, dressing up as Christ," it is extremely likely that you will see at once some way in which at that very moment the pretence could be made less of a pretense and more of a reality.”  (p. 187-188)

 

GIVE ME ALL

 

“Christ says "Give me All. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work: I want You.”  (p. 196)

 

COMING IN OUT OF THE WIND

 

“. . . the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning.  All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals. And the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back; in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in.  And so on, all day. Standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings; coming in out of the wind.”  (p. 198)

 

THE WRETCHED MACHINE YOU ARE TRYING TO DRIVE

 

>“He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on.  Do what you can.  one day (perhaps in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that) he  will fling it on the scrap-heap and give you a new one."  (p. 215)

 

EVERYTHING ELSE THROWN IN

 

>“Give up your self, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it.  Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fiber of your being, and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will ever be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”  (p. 227)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Contents

     Book I. RIGHT AND WRONG AS A CLUE TO THE MEANING OF THE UNIVERSE

     1. The Law of Human Nature
     2. Some Objections
     3. The Reality of the Law
     4. What Lies Behind the Law
     5. We Have Cause to Be Uneasy

     Book II. WHAT CHRISTIANS BELIEVE

     1. The Rival Conceptions of God
     2. The Invasion
     3. The Shocking Alternative
     4. The Perfect Penitent
     5. The Practical Conclusion

     Book III. CHRISTIAN BEHAVIOUR

     1. The Three Parts of Morality
     2. The "Cardinal Virtues"
     3. Social Morality
     4. Morality and Psychoanalysis
     5. Sexual Morality
     6. Christian Marriage
     7. Forgiveness
     8. The Great Sin
     9. Charity
     10. Hope
     11. Faith
     12. Faith

     Book  IV.  BEYOND  PERSONALITY:  OR FIRST STEPS IN THE  DOCTRINE OF THE TRINITY

     1. Making and Begetting
     2. The Three-Personal God
     3. Time and Beyond Time
     4. Good Infection
     5. The Obstinate Toy Soldiers
     6. Two Notes
     7. Let's Pretend
     8. Is Christianity Hard or Easy?
     9. Counting the Cost
     10. Nice People or New Men
     11. The New Men

 

 

 

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

 

"Surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of man he is..."

 

"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."

 

"If God thinks this state of war in the universe a price worth paying for free will...then we may take it it is worth paying."

 

"Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self..."

 

"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning..."

 

"When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all."

 

"You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house."

 

"There is nothing indulgent about the Moral Law. It is as hard as nails...If God is like the Moral Law, then He is not soft."

 

"Now that I am a Christian I do not have moods in which the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable."

 

"All that we call human history--money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery--[is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

 

"The natural life in each of us is something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe."

 

"[The natural life] knows that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that."

 

"The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is the hand over your whole self--all your wishes and precautions--to Christ."

 

—Mere Christianity

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://lib.ru/LEWISCL/mere_engl.txt 

http://www.comnett.net/~rex/cslewis.htm

http://graceofgodlutheran.com/index_files/page0019.htm