Is Christianity Hard or Easy?—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

"Putting on Christ, or first 'dressing up' as a son of God," the subject C.S Lewis addressed in his previous chapter on Divine Make-believe, "that you may finally become a real son ... is not a ... special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of Christianity. Christianity offers nothing else at all.... It differs from ordinary ideas of 'morality' and 'being good'.... We take as a starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and interests. We then admit that something else—call it 'morality' or 'decent behavior' ... has claims on this self.... We are very like an honest man paying his taxes. He pays them all right, but he does hope that there will be enough left over for him to live on."

"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. In the end, you will either give up trying to be good, or else become one of those people who...'live for others' but in a discontented, grumbling way.... The Christian way is different: harder, and easier. Christ says 'Give me All.... I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half-measures are any good.... Hand over the whole natural self.... I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: My own will shall become yours.'"

"Christ Himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, 'Take up your Cross'.... Next minute He says, 'My yoke is easy and my burden is light.' He means both.... In a battle, or in mountain climbing, there is often one thing that it takes a lot of [courage] to do; but it is also, in the long run, the safest thing to do. If you [chicken out], you will find yourself, hours later, in far worse danger.... It is like that here. 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 ... trying to let our mind and heart go their own way—centered on money or pleasure or ambition—and hoping, in spite of this, to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As He said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass-seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short: but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be plowed up and re-sown.

"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.... The new sort of life will be spreading ... because now we are letting Him work at the right part of us.... When He said, 'Be perfect,' He meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment.... We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad."

"It is easy to think that the Church has a lot of different objects—education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think that the State has a lot of different objects—military, political, economic, and whatnot. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden—this is what the State is there for. 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. In the same way 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 ... are simply a waste of time. God became Man for no other purpose.... It says in the Bible that the whole universe was made for Christ and that everything is to be gathered together in Him.... We men can be drawn into Christ—can become part of that wonderful present which the young Prince of the universe wants to offer His Father.... It is the only thing we were made for."

Highlights from Chapter 8: Is Christianity Hard or Easy? in Book 4: Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

Social Morality—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

The third chapter of the third book in C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity is on social morality. It explains that "the Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that....

"Christianity has not ... a detailed political programme for applying 'Do as you would be done by' to a particular society at a particular moment....  It is meant for all men at all times and the particular programme which suited one place or time would not suit another.... It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal."

"People say, 'The Church ought to give us a lead.' That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way. By the church they ought to mean the whole body of practicing Christians. And when they say that the Church should give us a lead, they ought to mean that some Christians—those who happen to have the right talents—should be economists and statesmen, and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting 'Do as you would be done by' into action. If that happened and if we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly. But, of course, when they ask for a lead from the Church most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political program. That is silly.  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 forever.... The application of Christian principles, say, to trade unionism or education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian [educators]: 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."

From a biblical view of society, "there are to be no passengers or parasites: if a man does not work, he ought not to eat. Everyone is to work with his own hands, and what is more, everyone's work is to produce something good ... no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to buy them.... To that extent a Christian society would be what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience  ... and ... respect ... to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and ... from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New Testament hates what it calls 'busybodies.'"

"In the passage where the New Testament says that everyone must work, it gives as a reason 'in order that he may have something to give to those in need'.... 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.... There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot because our [generosity] excludes them. I am speaking now of charities in the common way. Particular cases of distress among your own relatives, friends, neighbors or employees, which God, as it were, forces upon your notice, may demand much more: even to the crippling and endangering of your own position." 

"Christianity is the total plan for the human machine. We have all departed from that total plan in different ways.... Everyone is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest.... A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat 'Do as you would be done by' till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love God.... We are driven on to something more inward ... from social matters to religious matters. For the longest way round is the shortest way home."

Highlights from chapter 3: Social Morality, book 3: Christian Behaviour in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.

A Positive Way of Looking at Morality—Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis

 What a Convoy of Ships Can Teach Us About Moral Rules

Sourpuss? Spoilsport?

Ultimate Censor?

"A schoolboy ... replied that, as far as he could make out, God was 'the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it.' And I am afraid that is the sort of idea that the word Morality raises in ... many people's minds: something that interferes...that stops you having a good time.

Take Good Care of It!

"In reality, 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. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations. When you are being taught how to use any machine, the instructor keeps on saying, 'No, don't do it like that,' because, of course, there are all sorts of things that look all right and seem to you the natural way of treating the machine, but do not really work." (C.S. Lewis knew that all too well: because of a thumb defect, he was very clumsy with mechanical things and became a lifelong pedestrian and train traveler.) 

Lewis probes deeper into the subject of morality: "Perfect arithmetic is 'an ideal'; you will certainly make some mistakes in some calculations. But there is nothing very fine about trying to be quite accurate at each step in each sum. It would be idiotic not to try; for every mistake is going to cause you trouble later on. In the same way every moral failure is going to cause trouble, probably to others and certainly to yourself. By talking about rules and obedience instead of 'ideals' and 'idealism' we help remind ourselves of these facts.

What If They Were Hired to Provide Dance Music?

"Now let us go a step further. There are two ways in which the human machine goes wrong. One is when human individuals drift apart from one another, or else collide with one another and do one another damage. The other is when things go wrong inside the individual—when the different parts of him (his different faculties and desires and so on).... You can get the idea plain if you think of us as a fleet of ships sailing in formation. The voyage will be a success only ... if the ships do not collide and ... if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order.... Or, if you like, think of humanity as a band playing a tune. To get a good result ... each player's individual instrument must be in tune and also each must come in at the right moment so as to combine with all the others. But there is one thing we have not yet taken into account. We have not asked where the fleet is trying to get to, or what piece of music the band is trying to play. The instruments might be all in tune and ... come in at the right moment, but even so the performance would not be a success if they had been engaged to provide dance music and actually played nothing but Dead Marches. And however well the fleet sailed, its voyage would be a failure if it were meant to reach New York and actually arrived at Calcutta. Morality ... seems to be concerned with three things:

1. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals.
2. Secondly, with ... tidying up or harmonizing the things inside each individual.
3. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play.... Modern people are nearly always thinking about the first thing and forgetting the other two.

What If We're Rusty Inside?

"When a man says about something he wants to do, 'It can't be wrong because it doesn't do anyone else any harm,' he is thinking only of the first thing. He is thinking it does not matter what his ship is like inside provided that he does not run into the next ship. And it is quite natural, when we start thinking about morality, to begin with...social relations. For one thing, the results of bad morality in that sphere are so obvious and press on us every day: war and poverty and graft and lies and shoddy work....  But ... if our thinking about morality stops there, we might just as well not have thought at all. Unless we go onto the second thing—the tidying up inside each human being—we are only deceiving ourselves. What is the good of telling the ships how to steer so as to avoid collisions if, in fact, they are such crazy old tubs that they cannot be steered at all?"

Are You the Rightful Owner?

"Religion involves a series of statements about facts, which must be either true or false. If they are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the right sailing of the human fleet: if they are false, quite a different set. For example, let us go back to the man who says that a thing cannot be wrong unless it hurts some other human being. He quite understands that he must not damage the other ships in the convoy, but he honestly thinks that what he does to his own ship is simply his own business. But does it not make a great difference whether his ship is his own property or not? Does it not make a great difference whether I am ... the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord? If somebody else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself."

"Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false. Now there are a good many things that would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever.... If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared with his, is only a moment."

Which Lasts Longer: The Individual or the State? 

Highlights from chapter 1: The Three Parts of Morality, book 3: Christian Behaviour in Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. Click here for a clear view of how this chapter relates to the whole book.