C.S. Lewis

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.

The Son of God became a man to enable men to become sons of God.

Integrity is doing the right thing, even when no one is watching.

Don't judge a man by where he is, because you don't know how far he has come.

Don't let your happiness depend on something you may lose.

The fact that our heart yearns for something Earth can't supply is proof that Heaven must be our home.

Hardship often prepares an ordinary person for an extraordinary destiny.

Humility is not thinking less of yourself, it's thinking of yourself less.

The greatest evils in the world will not be carried out by men with guns, but by men in suits sitting behind desks

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…

Pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

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

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.

If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.

Friendship ... is born at the moment when one man says to another "What! You too? I thought that no one but myself . . .

God can’t give us peace and happiness apart from Himself because there is no such thing.

God doesn’t want something from us. He simply wants us.

I pray because I can’t help myself. I pray because I’m helpless. It doesn’t change God – it changes me.

The Law of Human Nature

C.S. Lewis introduces the concept of the 'Law of Human Nature,' a universal standard of right and wrong that all humans inherently recognize. This law is evident in the way people argue and make excuses for their behavior, indicating an underlying agreement on moral standards. Lewis argues that this moral law is not a social construct or a product of human instinct but a real, objective standard that transcends individual preferences. He states, 'Quarreling 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.' This idea is illustrated through everyday examples of people appealing to fairness and justice, suggesting an innate understanding of moral principles.

The Necessity of Free Will

Lewis argues that free will is essential for genuine love and goodness to exist. He explains that God granted humans free will, knowing the risks involved, because it allows for the possibility of real love and moral choices. Lewis states, '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.' This idea is illustrated by comparing different beings: a cow, a dog, a child, an ordinary man, a man of genius, and a superhuman spirit. The better the material a creature is made of, the greater its potential for both good and evil. This highlights the importance of free will in achieving True goodness and love, despite the inherent risks.

The Three Parts of Morality

Lewis challenges the common misconception that morality is merely a set of rules that restricts enjoyment. Instead, he argues that moral rules are akin to instructions for operating a machine, designed to prevent breakdowns and ensure smooth functioning. He uses the analogy of a fleet of ships to illustrate that morality involves three key aspects: fair play and harmony between individuals, internal harmony within each individual, and the overarching purpose or direction of human life. Lewis emphasizes that focusing solely on social relations without addressing internal morality and the ultimate purpose of life is insufficient. True morality requires attention to all three dimensions.

The Nature of Pride

Lewis delves deeply into the concept of pride, describing it as inherently competitive and the root of many other vices. He argues that pride is not about having something, but about having more than others. This competitive nature makes pride particularly insidious, as it thrives on comparison and superiority. Lewis states, 'Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.' This idea is illustrated through various examples, such as a man who seeks more wealth not for the pleasure it brings, but to be richer than others, or a political leader who demands more power to feel superior. Pride, according to Lewis, is the chief cause of misery and enmity, both among humans and between humans and God.

The Incarnation and Its Implications

Lewis delves into the profound mystery of the Incarnation, where the 'Second Person in God, the Son, became human Himself.' This transformation is not just a theological concept but a tangible reality where God took on human form, experiencing life as a man with specific physical attributes and cultural contexts. Lewis emphasizes that this act was not merely symbolic but a real event that had a transformative impact on humanity. He uses the analogy of a tin soldier coming to life to illustrate how Christ's incarnation brought a new dimension of life to humanity. This idea is vividly captured in the quote, 'The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point. For the first time we saw a real man.' This transformation is not isolated but affects the entire human race, past, present, and future, much like a drop of dye changes the color of an entire glass of water.

Engage in Community Worship

Participate actively in your Christian community. This collective experience helps you understand and experience God more fully, as the community acts as a 'laboratory outfit' for the science of theology.

We believe in decency so much—we feel the Rule or Law pressing on us so—that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility.

Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, 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.

We must therefore stick to the original, obvious meaning. The name Christians was first given at Antioch (Acts xi. 26) to ‘the disciples’, to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles.

The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts.

If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that.

This man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else.

Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are unselfish, not that they like being unselfish, but that they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human behavior in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave.

The Law of Human Nature, or of Right and Wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behavior. In this case, besides the actual facts, you have something else–a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.

If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe–no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way.

We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer. It all depends on the point of view.

Christ says that He is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

Perfect behaviour may be as unattainable as perfect gear-changing when we drive; but it is a necessary ideal prescribed for all men by the very nature of the human machine just as perfect gear-changing is an ideal prescribed for all drivers by the very nature of cars.

The application of Christian principles, say, to trade unionism or education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters: just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists -not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time.

Charity– giving to the poor–is an essential part of Christian morality: in the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats it seems to be the point on which everything turns.

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature.

The Christian law is not forcing upon the passion of love something which is foreign to that passion’s own nature: it is demanding that lovers should take seriously something which their passion of itself impels them to do.

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.

For Pride i s spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

Charity means ‘Love, in the Christian sense’. But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. 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.

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. 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.

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

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.

If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.

In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.

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.

God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all. The idea is worth trying to grasp because it removes some apparent difficulties in Christianity.

The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.

Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body different from one another and each contributing what no other could.

The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to ‘inject’ His kind of life and thought, His Zoe, into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man.

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self - all your wishes and precautions - to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead.

The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.

The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.

Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognise their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine.

The Universality and Objectivity of Moral Law

Lewis contends that the moral law is universal, cutting across different cultures and historical periods. Despite variations in customs and practices, the core principles of morality remain consistent. He challenges the notion that moral relativism can explain the differences in moral codes, arguing instead that these differences are superficial. He writes, 'If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own.' This universality supports his claim that the moral law is a fundamental aspect of human nature.

The Role of Jesus Christ

Lewis emphasizes the unique role of Jesus Christ in human history. He argues that Jesus' claims to divinity are either True, or He was a lunatic or worse. Lewis writes, '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... or else he would be the Devil of Hell.' This 'trilemma' forces readers to confront the True nature of Jesus' identity. Lewis further explains that Jesus' death and resurrection are central to Christianity, as they provide a means for humans to be reconciled with God. This reconciliation is not about adhering to a specific theory but understanding that Christ's death has given humanity a fresh start.

Reflect on Universal Morality

Examine your daily interactions to identify moments when you appeal to a standard of fairness or justice. Recognize that these appeals are rooted in a universal moral law that transcends personal preferences.

Acknowledge Moral Failures

Be honest about your shortcomings and resist the urge to make excuses. Accepting responsibility for your actions is the first step towards personal growth and moral improvement.

Embrace Free Will Responsibly

Understand that free will is a gift that allows for genuine love and moral choices. Use it wisely to make decisions that align with goodness and love.

Cultivate Enduring Love

Focus on building a deeper, more stable love that goes beyond the initial thrill of being in love. Reinforce this love through will, habit, and, if applicable, spiritual practices.

Act Charitably Regardless of Feelings

Instead of waiting to feel love or affection for others, act as if you already do. This behavior can help cultivate genuine feelings of love and reduce animosity.

Embrace the Transformation

Understand that becoming a son of God is a process that involves both divine intervention and personal effort. Lay yourself open to Christ and allow His life to work within you.

Quarreling 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.

If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own.

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

If your moral ideas can be Truer, and those of the Nazis less True, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be True about.

When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.

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

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... or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

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'.

Moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine.

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

Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good – above all, that we are better than someone else — I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil.

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did.

We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

As St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence: on the contrary, He told us to be not only "as harmless as doves," but also "as wise as serpents." He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head.

A man can't be taken to hell, or sent to hell: you can only get there on your own steam.

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.

The Christian life is different: harder, and easier. 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. I have not come torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measure are any good. I don’t want to cut off a branch here and a branch there, I want to have the whole tree down. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked-the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself; my own will shall become yours.

If we ask: ‘Why ought I to be unselfish?’ and you reply ‘Because it is good for society,’ we may then ask, ‘Why should I care what’s good for society except when it happens to pay me personally?’ and then you will have to say, ‘Because you ought to be unselfish’–which simply brings us back to where we started.

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.

We believe in decency so much—we feel the Rule or Law pressing on us so—that we cannot bear to face the fact that we are breaking it, and consequently we try to shift the responsibility.

Ever since I became a Christian I have thought that the best, 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.

We must therefore stick to the original, obvious meaning. The name Christians was first given at Antioch (Acts xi. 26) to ‘the disciples’, to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles.

The law of gravity tells you what stones do if you drop them; but the Law of Human Nature tells you what human beings ought to do and do not. In other words, when you are dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts.

If you do not take the distinction between good and bad very seriously, then it is easy to say that anything you find in this world is a part of God. But, of course, if you think some things really bad, and God really good, then you cannot talk like that.

This man, since He was a Jew, could not mean that kind of God. God, in their language, meant the Being outside the world, who had made it and was infinitely different from anything else.

Men ought to be unselfish, ought to be fair. Not that men are unselfish, not that they like being unselfish, but that they ought to be. The Moral Law, or Law of Human Nature, is not simply a fact about human behavior in the same way as the Law of Gravitation is, or may be, simply a fact about how heavy objects behave.

The Law of Human Nature, or of Right and Wrong, must be something above and beyond the actual facts of human behavior. In this case, besides the actual facts, you have something else–a real law which we did not invent and which we know we ought to obey.

If there was a controlling power outside the universe, it could not show itself to us as one of the facts inside the universe–no more than the architect of a house could actually be a wall or staircase or fireplace in that house. The only way in which we could expect it to show itself would be inside ourselves as an influence or a command trying to get us to behave in a certain way.

We call a cancer bad, they would say, because it kills a man; but you might just as well call a successful surgeon bad because he kills a cancer. It all depends on the point of view.

Christ says that He is ‘humble and meek’ and we believe Him; not noticing that, if He were merely a man, humility and meekness are the very last characteristics we could attribute to some of His sayings.

Perfect behaviour may be as unattainable as perfect gear-changing when we drive; but it is a necessary ideal prescribed for all men by the very nature of the human machine just as perfect gear-changing is an ideal prescribed for all drivers by the very nature of cars.

The application of Christian principles, say, to trade unionism or education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters: just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists -not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time.

Charity– giving to the poor–is an essential part of Christian morality: in the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats it seems to be the point on which everything turns.

Every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature.

The Christian law is not forcing upon the passion of love something which is foreign to that passion’s own nature: it is demanding that lovers should take seriously something which their passion of itself impels them to do.

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.

For Pride i s spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

Charity means ‘Love, in the Christian sense’. But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. 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.

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. 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.

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

Now Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people do not know what temptation means. This is an obvious lie. Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.

If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.

In God’s dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube.

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.

God, from above or outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all. The idea is worth trying to grasp because it removes some apparent difficulties in Christianity.

The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or (putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern, take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which we were made.

Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body different from one another and each contributing what no other could.

The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to ‘inject’ His kind of life and thought, His Zoe, into you; beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man.

The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self - all your wishes and precautions - to Christ. But it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead.

The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. And unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, etc., are simply a waste of time.

The Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.

The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose.

Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognise their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered.

For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine.

Quarreling 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.

If anyone will take the trouble to compare the moral teaching of, say, the ancient Egyptians, Babylonians, Hindus, Chinese, Greeks, and Romans, what will really strike him will be how very like they are to each other and to our own.

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

If your moral ideas can be Truer, and those of the Nazis less True, there must be something—some Real Morality—for them to be True about.

When you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all: it is like cutting off the branch you are sitting on.

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

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... or else he would be the Devil of Hell.

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'.

Moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the running of that machine.

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

Whenever we find that our religious life is making us feel that we are good – above all, that we are better than someone else — I think we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil.

Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbour; act as if you did.

We have to be continually reminded of what we believe. Neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.

No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.

If we ask: ‘Why ought I to be unselfish?’ and you reply ‘Because it is good for society,’ we may then ask, ‘Why should I care what’s good for society except when it happens to pay me personally?’ and then you will have to say, ‘Because you ought to be unselfish’–which simply brings us back to where we started.