“If we fail to forgive ourselves when God has done so, we make ourselves a higher judge than Him.”
“People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, ‘If you keep a lot of rules, I’ll reward you, and if you don’t, I’ll do other things.’ I do not think that this is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that 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.”
“No amount of falls will really undo us if we keep on picking ourselves up each time. We shall of course be very muddy and tattered children by the time we reach home. But the bathrooms are all ready, the towels put out, the clean clothes in the airing cupboard. The only fatal thing is to lose one’s temper and give up.”
“It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which . . . you would be strongly tempted to worship. . . . There are no ordinary people.”
| “Love Thy Neighbor,” in The Joyful Christian (New York: Touchstone, 1996), 197.
“People are told they ought to love God, but they cannot find any such feelings in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before: Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.”
“Courage is the form of every virtue at the testing point. Pilate was merciful until it became risky.”
“There seem, in fact, to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, or saint: or else, it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name Revelation might properly be given…
“This consciousness is neither a logical, nor an illogical, inference from the facts of experience; if we did not bring it to our experience we could not find in there. It is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”
“We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ.”
“This may raise the ridiculous idea that the Fall took God by surprise and upset His plan, or else — more ridiculously still — that God planned the whole thing for conditions which, He well knew, were never going to be realised. In fact, of course, God saw the crucifixion in the act of creating the first nebula.”
“Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted in spite of your changing moods.”
| Mere Christianity