Mere Christianity

Preface

• Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son.
• When a word ceases to be a term of description and it becomes merely a term of praise, it no longer tells you facts about the objects: it only tells you about the speakers attitude to to that object.
• The name Christians was first given in Antioch (Acts 11:16) to ’the disciples’, to those who accepted the teaching of the apostles.
• God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait.
• The question should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness there? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal of this particular door-keeper?

Foreword

• Our declaring the notion of sin to be obsolete has not diminished human suffering.
• The longest way round is the shortest way home.
• “There are no ordinary people”; “it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit.”
• Even someone he envisions as “poisoned by a wretched upbringing in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels” can be assured that God is well aware of “hat a wretched machine you are trying to drive,” and asks you only that you “keep on, [doing] the best you can”.

Book I: Right and Wrong as the Clue to the Meaning of the Universe

The Law of Human Nature

• Quarrelling 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
• he cannot disobey those laws which he shares with other things; but the law which is peculiar to his human nature, the law he does not share with animals or vegetables or inorganic things, is the one he can disobey if he chooses.
• we believe in the Law of Nature. If we do not believe in decent behaviour, why should we be so anxious to make excuses for not having behaved decently? The truth is, we believe in decency so much - we feel like the Rule of Law pressing on us so - that we cannot bear to face the fact that we’re breaking it.

Some Objections

• The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play, our instincts are merely the keys.
• The Moral Law is not any one instinct or set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing our instincts.
• Progress means not just changing, but changing for the better.
• If your moral ideas can be truer, and those of Nazis less true, there must be something - some Real Morality - for them to be true about.
• 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 [reason matters].

The Reality of the Law

• I am not concerned at present with blame; I’m trying to find out truth
• when you’re dealing with humans, something else comes in above and beyond the actual facts. You have the facts (how men do behave) and you also have something else (how they ought to behave). In the rest of the universe there need not be anything but the facts.
• you cannot say that what we call decent behaviour in others is simply the behaviour that happens to be useful to us.
• true that safety and happiness can only come from individ-uals, classes, and nations being honest and fair and kind to each other.

What Lies Behind the Law

• creatures like ourselves who are able to think
• what is behind the universe is more like a mind that it is like anything else we know. That is to say, it is conscious, and has purposes, and prefers one thing to another. And on this view it made the universe, partly for purposes we do not know, but partly, at any rate, in order to produce creatures like itself - I mean, it itself to the extent of having minds.
• There is one thing, and only one, in the whole universe which we know more about than we could learn from external observation. That one thing is Man.
• observations would only show what we did, and the moral law is about what we ought to do.
• The only packet I am allowed to open is Man. When I do, especially when I open that particular man called Myself, I find that I do not exist on my own, that I am under a law; that somebody or something wants me to behave in a certain way.
• what is the sense in saying that something without a mind ‘strives’ or has ‘purposes’?
• One reason why many people find Creative Evolution so attractive is that it gives one much of emotional comfort of believing in God and non of the less pleasant consequences.

We Have Cause to Be Uneasy

• progress means getting nearer to the place where you want to be. And if you have then a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any nearer.
• the Being behind the universe is intensely interested in right conduct - in fair play, unselfishness, courage, good faith, honesty and truthfulness.
• Goodness is either the great safety or the great danger - according to the way you want to react to it.
• If you look for truth, you might find comfort in the end: if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth - only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with, in the end, despair.

Book II: What Christians Believe

The Revival Conceptions of God

• God beyond good and evil - is called Pantheism. It was held by the great Prussian philosopher Hegel and, as far as I can understand them, the Hindus. The other view is held by Jews, Mohammedans and Christians.
• Christianity is a fighting religion.
• My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust?
• If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that is has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning.

The Invasion

• It is no good asking for a simple religion. After all real things are not simple. They look simple, but they are not.
• Reality, in fact, is usually something you could not have guessed. That is one of the reasons I believe Christianity. It is a religion you could have not guessed.
• Christian view that this is a good world that has gone wrong, but still retains memory of what it ought have been. The other is called Dualism. Dualism means the belief that there are two equal and independent powers at the back of everything, one of them good and the other bad, and that this universe is the battlefield in which they fight out an endless war. I personally think that next to Christianity Dualism is the manliest and most sensible creed on the market.
• good means what you ought to prefer quite regardless of what you happen to like at any given moment.
• you are putting into the universe a third thing in addition to the two Powers: some law or standard or rule of good which one of the powers conforms to and the other fails to conform to.
• pleasure, money, power, and safety are all, as far as they go, good things. The badness consists in pursuing them by the wrong method, or in the wrong way, or too much.
• You can be good for mere sake of goodness: you cannot be bad for the mere sake of badness.
• Goodness is, so to speak itself: badness is only spoiled goodness.
• We call sadism a sexual perversion; but you must first have the idea of a normal sexuality before you can talk of its being perverted.
• To be bad, he must exist and have intelligence and will. But existence, intelligence and will are in themselves good. Therefore he must be getting them from the Good Power.
• devil is a fallen angel
• civil war, a rebellion, and that we are living in a part of the universe occupied by the rebel.
• Enemy-occupied territory - that is what this world is.

The Shocking Alternative

• If a thing is free to be good it is also free to be bad.
• free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.
• The moment you have a self at all, there is a possibility of putting yourself first - wanting to be the centre - wanting to be God, in fact. That is the sin of Satan.
• some corruption in our sexual nature followed the fall and it was the result, not its cause.
• Good designed the human machine to run on Himself. He Himself is the fuel our spirits were designed to burn, or the food our spirits were designed to feed on.
• First of all He left us conscience.
• Secondly, He sent the human race what I call good dreams - queer stories scattered through heathen religions about a god who dies and comes to life again, and by his death, has somehow given new life to men
• Thirdly, He selected one particular people and spent several centuries hammering into their heads the sort of God He was - that there was only one of Him and that He cared about right conduct.
• unhesitatingly behaved as He was the party concerned, the person chiefly offended in all offences. This make sense if He really was the God whose laws are broken and whose love is wounded in every sin.

The Perfect Penitent

• A man can eat his dinner without understanding exactly how food nourishes him. A man can accept what Christ ha done without knowing how it works
• Christ was killed for us, that His death has washed our sins, and that by dying He disabled death itself.
• fallen man is not simple an imperfect creature who needs improvement: he is a rebel who must lay down his arms. Laying down your arms, surrendering, saying you are sorry, realising 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’.
• 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.
• Just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God’s dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debts, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.

The Practical Conclusion

• The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ: perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because he was man.
• life - we derived it from others, from our father and mother and all our ancestors, without our consent - and by a very curious process, involving pleasure, pain, and danger.
• you are not making it, you are only keeping up a life you got from someone else. In the same way a Christian can lose the Christ-life which has been put into him and he has to make efforts to keep it.
• he is only nourishing and protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts.
• A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can to some extend repair itself. In the same way a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble - because the Christ-life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat (in some degree) the kind of voluntary death which Christ Himself carried out.
• He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us; just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it.
• God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us.
• Christians are Christ’s body, the organism through which he works. Every addition to that body enables Him to do more.
• He wants to give us the chance of joining His side freely.
• There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it has become impossible to stand up.

Book III: Christian Behaviour

The Three Parts of Morality

• moral rules are directions for running the human machine.
• human individual drift apart from one another, or else collide with one another and do one another damage, by cheating or bullying. The other is when things go wrong inside the individual
• The voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the ship do not collide and get in one another’s way; and, secondly, if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order.
• Unless we go on to the second thing - the tidying up inside each human being - we are only deceiving ourselves.
• We cannot make men good by law: and without good men you cannot have a good society.
• if we are to think about morality, we must think of all three departments: relations between man and man: things inside each man: and relations between man and the power that made him.

The ‘Cardinal Virtues’

• Prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come out of it
• He wants a child’s heart, but a grown up’s head.
• one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself.
• Temperance referred … to all pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion.
• One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one else to give it up.
• Justice … is the old name for everything we should now call ‘fairness’.
• just as a mathematician’s mind has a certain habit and outlook which is there even when he is not doing mathematics. In the same way a man who perseveres in doing just actions gets in the end a certain quality of character.
• We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort.
• The point is not that God will refuse you admission to His eternal world if you have not got certain qualities of character: the point is that if people have not got at least the beginnings of those qualities inside them, then no possible external conditions could make a ‘Heaven’ for them - that is, could make them happy with the deep, strong, unshakable kind of happiness God intends for us.

Social Morality

• The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live for ever.
• there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not eat. Every one is to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one’s work is to produce something good: there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them.
• obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from wives to husbands.
• All these people told us not to lend money at interest, and lending money at interest - what we all investments - is the basis of our whole system.
• every one must work, it gives a reason ‘in order that he may have something to give to those in need’
• For many of us the great obstacle to charity lies not in our luxurious living or desire for more money, but in our fear - fear of insecurity.
• I may repeat ‘Do as you would be done by’ till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry out till I love my neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God: and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him.

Morality and Psychoanalysis

• The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices.
• 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: either into a creature that is in harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God, and with its fellow creatures, and with itself.
• When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less.
• You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping.

Sexual Morality

• A real desire to believe all the good you can of others and to make others as comfortable as you can will solve most of the problems.
• “Either marriage, with complete faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence”.
• sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons; the gorged, as well as the famished, like titillations.
• a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales-resistance.
• Before we can be cured we must want to be cured
• Virtue - even attempted virtue - brings light, indulgence brings fog.
• If anyone things that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual.

Christian Marriage

• man and wife are to be regarded as single organism
• The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union (the sexual) from all other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union.
• divorce as something like cutting up a living body, as a kind of surgical operation.
• Justice, as I said before, includes the keeping of promises
• those who are in love have a natural inclination to bind themselves by promises.
• ‘being in love’ is a glorious state, and, in several ways, good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it subordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality; in that sense, love is the great conqueror of lust.
• Being in love is a good thing, but is not the best thing.
• the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest.
• A thing will not really live unless it first dies.
• Christian wives promise to obey their husbands. In Christian marriage the man is said to be the ‘head’.
• when there is areal disagreement, what is to happen?
• family policy. You cannot have a permanent association without a constitution.
• There must be something unnatural about the rule of wives over husbands, because the wives themselves are half ashamed of it and despise the husbands whom they rule.
• The relations of the family to the outer world - what might be called its foreign policy - must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world.
• She is the special trustee of their interests.
• He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife.

Forgiveness

• Every one says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.
• if we do not forgive we shall not be forgiven.
• hate a bad man’s actions, but not hate the bad man; or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner.
• there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life - namely myself.
• with that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white as black itself. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything - God and our friends and ourselves included - as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
• loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment
• It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy.
• All killing is not murder any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery.
• The idea of the knight - the Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause - is one of the great Christian ideas.
• Remember, we Christians think man lives for ever. Therefore, what really matters in 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 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.
• 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 him good.

The Great Sin

• There is no fault which makes a man more unpopular, and no fault which we are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the more we have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.
• Pride or Self-Conceit
• the utmost evil
• it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is complete anti-God state of mind.
• each person’s pride is in competition with every one else’s pride. It is because I want to be the big noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise.
• Pride is essentially competitive - is competitive by its very nature - while the other vices are competitive only, so to speak, by accident. Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
• there is nothing makes a man feel so superior to others as being able to move them about like toy soldiers. What makes a pretty girl spread misery wherever she goes by collecting admirers?
• What is it that makes a political leader or a whole nation to go on and on demanding more and more?
• pride always means enmity - it is enmity.
• A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and of course, as long as you’re 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 devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting you up in the Dictatorship of Pride.
• Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense
• Pleasure in being praised is not Pride.
• devil loves ‘curing’ a small fault by giving you a great one. We must try not to be vain, but we must never call it our Pride to cure our vanity.
• it would be better than being proud simply of himself. To love and admire anything outside yourself is to take one step away from utter spiritual ruin, though we shall not be well so long as we love and admire anything more than we love and admire God.
• He will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all.
• If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realize that one is proud, and a biggish step, too.

Charity

• 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.
• Do not waste time bothering whether you ’love’ your neighbour, act as if you did.
• When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love him.
• The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he ’likes’ them: the Christians, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on - including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.
• Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.
• Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.
• If we are trying to do His will we are obeying the commandments, ‘Thou shalt love the Lord thy God.’ He will give us feelings of love if he pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves.
• though our feelings come and go, His love for us does not.

Hope

• Christians who did most for the present world were just those who thought most of the next.
• all left their mark on Earth, precisely because their minds were occupied with Heaven.
• Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ’thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.
• We must learn to want something else even more.
• 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 probably explanation is that I was made for another world.
• Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it to suggest the real thing.
• if they cannot understand books written by grown-ups, the should not talk about them.
• 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 splendour and power and joy. Gold is mentioned to suggest the timelessness of Heaven (gold does not rust) and the preciousness of it.

Faith

• The battle is between faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.
• His senses and emotions have destroyed his faith in what he really knows to be true.
• rebellion of your moods against your real self
• unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off’, you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion. Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.
• 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.
• Only those who try to resist temptation know how strong it is.
• You find out the strength of wind by trying to walk against it, not by lying down.
• That is why bad people, in one sense, know very little about badness. They have lived a sheltered life by always giving in.
• Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means - the only complete realist.
• If there was any idea that God had set us a sort of exam, and that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be wiped out. If there was any idea of a soft of bargain - any idea that we could perform our side of the contract and thus put God in our debt so that it was up to Him, in mere justice, to perform His side - that has to be wiped out.
• Every faculty you have, your power of thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God. If you devoted every moment of your whole life exclusively to His services you could not give Him anything that was not in a sense His own already.
• ‘Daddy, give me sixpence to buy you a birthday present.’
• When a man has made these two discoveries God can really get to work. It is after this that real life begins. The man is awake now.

Faith

• even if he could he would only be giving back to God what was already God’s own. In other words, he discovers his bankruptcy.
• what God cares about is not exactly our actions. What he cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind or quality.
• if you are right with Him you will inevitably be right with all your fellow-creatures.
• we cannot, in that sense, discover our failure to keep God’s law except by trying our very hardest (and then failing).
• All this trying leads up to the vital moment at which you turn to God and say, ‘You must do this. I can’t’. Do not, I implore you, start asking yourselves, ‘Have I reached that moment?’
• The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ will somehow share with him the perfect human obedience which He carried out from His birth to His crucifixion: that Christ will make the man more like Himself and, in a sense, make good his deficiencies. In Christian language, He will share His ‘sonship’ with us, will make us, like Himself, ‘Sons of God’.
• Christ offers something for nothing. He even offers everything for nothing.
• no temptation is ever overcome until we stop trying to overcome it
• There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice.
• Faith in Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point: and out of that Faith in Him good actions must inevitably come.
• if what you call ‘faith’ in Christ does not involve taking the slightest notice of what He says, the nit is not Faith at all - not faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him.
• God and man are working together.
• you could say, ‘He did this bit and I did that.’ But this way of thinking breaks down. God is not like that.
• Christianity seems at first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, ye it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond.

Book IV: Beyond Personality: Or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity

Making and Begetting

• Theology is like the map
• Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map
• if you want to get any further, you must use the map
• In other words, Theology is practical
• if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean that you have no idea about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong ones - bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas.
• If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then Christianity is of no importance.
• When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself.
• when you make, you make something of a different kind from yourself.
• men are not Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.
• Everything God has made has some likeness to Himself. Space is like Him in its hugeness
• Matter is like God in having energy
• The vegetable world is like him because it is alive, and He is the ’living God’.
• The intense activity and fertility of the insects, for example, is a first dim resemblance to the unceasing activity and creativeness of God.
• When you come to man, the highest of the animals, we get the completest resemblance to God which we know of.
• Man not only lives, but loves and reasons: biological life reaches its highest known level in him.
• Biological life and Spiritual life
• The Biological sot which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything else in Nature) is always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc., is Bios. The spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has, to be sure, a certain shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe.
• This world is a great sculptor’s shop. We are the statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

The Three-Personal God

• It is only the Christians who have any idea of how human souls can be taken into the life of God and yet remain themselves
• A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimension world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined a new ways - in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.
• 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 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.
• he is being pulled into God, by God, while still remaining himself.
• When you come to knowing God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him.
• it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, through it has no favourites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.
• the instrument through which you see God is your whole self. And if a man’s self is not kept clean and bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they have been looking at God through a dirty lens
• If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. We are dealing with fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.

Time and Beyond Time

• He has infinite attention to spare for each one of us. He does not have to deal with us in the mass.
• When Christ died, He died for you individually just as much as if you had been the only man in the world.
• His life is Himself.
• If you picture Time as a straight line along which we have to travel, then you must picture God as the whole page on which the line is drawn.
• tiny little present
• He does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them, because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not ‘foresee’ you doing things tomorrow. He simply sees you doing them.
• He knows your tomorrow’s actions in just the same way - because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already ‘Now’ for him.

Good Infection

• it is important to make clear how one thing can be the source, or cause, or origin, of another without being there before it. The Son exists because the Father exists: but there never was a time before the Father produced the Son.
• Much the most important thing to know is that it is a relation of love. The Father delights in His Son; the Son looks up to His Father.
• ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two persons.
• in Christianity God is not a static thing - not even a person - but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance. The union between the Father and the Son is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person.
• What groups out of the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, in fact the Third of the three Persons who are God.
• if you want to be wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must get close to, or even into, the thing that has them.
• They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.
• Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is separated from God, what can he but wither and die?
• if we can let God have His way, come to share in the life of Christ.
• Christ is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us.
• Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

The Obstinate Toy Soldiers

• The natural life in each of us is something self-centered, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. It is afraid of the light and air of the spiritual world, just as people who have been brought up to be dirty are afraid of bath.
• after being thus killed … the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the whole point.
• If you could see humanity spread out in time, as God sees it, it would not look like a lot of separate things dotted about. It would look like one single growing thing - rather like a very complicated tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other. And not only that. Individuals are not really separate from God any more than from one another.
• business of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into timeless ‘spiritual’ life, has been done for us. Humanity is already ‘saved’ in principle.

Two Notes

• if there were several sons they would all be related to one another and to the Father in the same way. How would they differ from one another?
• Was Nature - space and time and matter - created precisely in order to make many-ness possible?
• When you find yourself wanting to turn your children, or pupils, or even your neighbour, into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be like that.
• If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself you will become an Individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a Totalitarian. But a Christian must not be either

Let’s Pretend

• Our Father … putting yourself in the pace of a son of God.
• pretence leads up to the real thing.
• Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving is if you had it already. That is why children’s games are so important.
• There are lots of thing which your conscience might not call definitively wrong (specially things in your mind) but which you will see at once you cannot go on doing if you are seriously trying to be like Christ. For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong; you are trying to catch the good infection from a Person.
• The real Son of God is at your side. He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself.
• If there were no help from Christ, there would be no help from other human beings. He works on us in all sorts of ways: not only through what we thing our ‘religious life’. He works through Nature, through our own bodies, through books, sometimes through experiences which seem (at the time) anti-Christian.
• usually it is those who know Him that bring Him to others. That is why the Church, the whole body of Christians showing Him to one another, is so important.
• At first it is natural for a baby to take its mother’s milk without knowing its mother. It is equally natural for us to see the man who helps us without seeing Christ behind him.
• We must go on to recognise the real Giver.
• never pin your whole faith on any human being: not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand: but do not try building a house on it.
• change which I most need to undergo is change that my own direct, voluntary efforts cannot bring about.
• But I cannot, by direct moral effort, give myself new motives. After the first few steps in the Christian life we realise that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God.
• God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one.
• the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does.

Is Christianity Hard or Easy

• Some of the things the ordinary self wanted to do turn out to be what we call ‘wrong’: well, we must give them up. Other things, which the self did not want to do, turn out to be what we call ‘right’: well, we shall have to do them.
• The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you. And your natural self, which is thus being starved and hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier and angrier.
• I want You. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good.
• The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing.
• The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over the whole self - all your wishes and precautions - to Christ.
• We must be hatched or go bad.
• The State exists simply to promote and protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life.
• Church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christ. If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself, are simply a waste of time.
• I think we can see how the higher animals are in a sense drawn into Man when he loves them and makes them (as he does) much more nearly human than they would otherwise be.
• It might be that when intelligent creatures entered into Christ they would, in that way, bring all the other things in along with them.
• there are strange, exciting hints in the Bible that when we are drawn in, a great many other things in Nature will begin to come right. The bad dream will be over: it will be morning.

Counting the Cost

• The only help I will give you is to become perfect. You might want something less: but I will give you nothing less.
• He will cure it all right: but He will not stop there. That may be all you asked; but if once you call Him in, He will give you the full treatment.
• God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.
• He is building quite a different house from one you thought of
• You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.
• a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly (though, of course, on a smaller scale).
• The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what were in for. Nothing less.

Nice People or New Men

• There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it.
• Many of the good Pagans long before Christ’s birth may have been in this position.
• The niceness, in fact, is God’s gift to Dick, not Dick’s gift to God.
• What He is watching and waiting and working for is something that is not easy even for God, because, from the nature of the case, even He cannot produce it by a mere act of power.
• It is something they can freely give Him or freely refuse to Him. Will they, or will they not, turn to Him and thus fulfil the only purpose for which they were created?
• He can help it to do so. He cannot force it.
• It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice thing: but to convert rebellious wills cost His crucifixion.
• There is a paradox her. As long as Dick does not turn to God, he things his niceness as his own, and just as long as he things that, it is not his own. It is when Dick realises that his niceness is not his own but a gift from God, and when he offers it back to God - it is just then that it beings to be really his own. For now Dick is beginning to take share in his own creation. 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. In other words, it is hard for those who are ‘rich’ in this sense to enter the Kingdom.
• If you are a nice person - if virtue comes easily to you - beware! Much is expected from those to whom much is given.
• A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world - and might even be more difficult to save.
• God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man.
• One soul in the whole creation you do know: and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. I there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door neighbours or memories of what you have read in books.

The New Men

• Next Step will be really new; it will go off in a direction you could have never dreamed of.
• I should expect the next stage in Evolution not to be a stage in Evolution at all: should expect that Evolution itself as a method of producing change will be superseded.
• It is not a change from brainy men to brainier men: it is a change that goes off in a totally different direction - a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God. The first instance appeared in Palestine two thousand years ago.
• He is not merely a new man, one specimen of the species, but the new man. He is the origin and centre and life of all the new men. He came into the created universe, of His own will, bringing with him Zoe, thew new life. (I mean new to us, of course: in its own place Zoe has existed for ever and ever.) And He transmits it not by heredity but by what I have called ‘good infection’. Everyone who gets it gets it by personal contact with him. Other men became ’new’ by being ‘in Him’.
• The stakes are higher. By falling back at the earlier steps a creature is lost, at the worst, its few years of life on this earth: very often it did not lose even that. By falling back at this step we lose a prize which is (in the strictest sense of the word) infinite.
• Until we rise and follow Christ we are still part of Nature, still in the womb of our great mother.
• In an ordinary birth the baby has not much choice: here it has.
• Their very voices and faces are different from ours: stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant.
• They do now draw attention to themselves. You tend to think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do, but they need you less.
• they recognise one another immediately and infallibly, across every barrier of colour, class, sex, age, and even of creeds. In that way, to become holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at the very lowest, it must be great fun.
• To become new men means losing what we now call ‘ourselves’. Out of our selves, into Christ, we must go.
• The more we get what we now call ‘ourselves’ out of the way and let Him take us over, the more truly ourselves we become.
• It is no good trying to ‘be myself’ without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my won, the more I become dominated by my own heredity and upbringing and surroundings and natural desires.
• It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His Personality, that I first being to have a real personality of my own.
• There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found among the most ’natural’ men, not among those who surrender to Christ.
• Christ will indeed give you a real personality: but you must not go to Him for the sake of that.
• Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His( will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him.
• Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making.
• Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end: submit with every fibre of your being, and you will find eternal life.