CS Lewis

“I cannot myself see why these things (ordinances) should be conductors of the new life. But then, if one did not happen to know, I should never had seen any connection between a particular physical pleasure and the appearance of a new human being in the world. We have to take reality as it comes to us; there is no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or what we should have expected it to be like.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

Topics:

“We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven — a senile benevolence who, as they say, ‘liked to see young people enjoying themselves’, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all’.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

Topics:

“Repentance, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before he will take you back and which he could let you off if he chose. It is simply a description of what going back to him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking him to let you back without going back.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

Topics: , , ,

“The more often [one] feels without acting, the less [one] will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less [he or she] will be able to feel.”

CS Lewis  |  The Screwtape Letters (New York: Macmillan, 1966), 61.

Topics: ,

“We find in our Prayer Book that Psalm 110 is one of those appointed for Christmas Day. We may at first be surprised by this. There is nothing in it about peace and goodwill, nothing remotely suggestive of the stable at Bethlehem. … The note is not ‘Peace and goodwill’ but ‘Beware. He’s coming’.”

CS Lewis  |  Reflections on the Psalms

Topics: , , ,

“The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a foetus inside a woman’s body. If you want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

Topics: , ,

“In the Christian story, God descends to reascend. He comes down; down from the heights of absolute being into time and space, down into humanity; down further still, if embryologists are right, to recapitulate in the womb ancient and pre-human phases of life; down to the very roots and seabed of the Nature.”

CS Lewis  |  Miracles

Topics: , , ,

“The people never admire a man for doing something he likes; the very words ‘But he likes it’ imply the corollary ‘And therefore it has no merit’. Yet Kant stands the obvious truth, noted by Aristotle, that the more virtuous a man becomes the more he enjoys virtuous actions.”

CS Lewis  |  The Problem of Pain

Topics:

“For God is not merely mending, not simply restoring a status quo. Redeemed humanity is to be something more glorious than unfallen humanity would have been, more glorious than any unfallen race now is. . . . And this super-added glory will, with true vicariousness, exalt all creatures.”

CS Lewis  |  The Grand Miracle

Topics: , ,

“If we are to think about morality, we must think of three departments; relations between man and man; things inside each man; and relations between man and the power that made him.”

CS Lewis  |  Mere Christianity

Topics: ,