PART EIGHT: Recognizing Sin
PART EIGHT
No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.
Mere Christianity
A thing may be morally neutral and yet the desire for that thing may be dangerous.
The Weight of Glory
Badness is only spoiled goodness.
Mere Christianity
The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or bow, is a prosaic barbarian.
‘Equality’ in Present Concerns
The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual: the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport, and back-biting; the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the Animal self, and the Diabolical self. The Diabolical self is the worse of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But, of course, it is better to be neither.
Mere Christianity
If we cannot ‘practice the presence of God’, it is something to practice the absence of God, to become increasingly aware of our unawareness till we feel like man who should stand beside a great cataract and hear no noise, or like a man in a story who looks in a mirror and finds no face there, or a man in a dream who stretches his hand to visible objects and gets no sensation of touch. To know that one is dreaming is to no longer be perfectly asleep.
The Four Loves
This year, or this month, or, more likely, this very day, we have failed to practice ourselves the kind of behavior we expect from other people.
Mere Christianity
I live in the Managerial Age, in a world of ‘Admin’. The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labor camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern.
The Screwtape Letters
He [the devil] always sends errors into the world in pairs—pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worse. You see why, of course? He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them.
Mere Christianity
The safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.
The Screwtape Letters
It is the magician's bargain: give up our soul, get power in return. But once our souls, that is, ourselves, have been given up, the power thus conferred will not belong to us. We shall in fact be the slaves and puppets of that to which we have given our souls.
The Abolition of Man
There are two equal and opposite errors into which our race can fall about the devils. One is to disbelieve in their existence. The other is to believe, and to feel an excessive and unhealthy interest in them. They themselves are equally pleased by both errors and hail a materialist or a magician with the same delight.
The Screwtape Letters
It is … the practical and prudential cares of this world, and even the smallest and most prosaic of those cares, that are the great distraction. The gnat-like cloud of petty anxieties and decisions about the conduct of the next hour have interfered with my prayers more often than any passion or appetite whatever.
The Four Loves
When you are arguing against God you are arguing against the very power that makes you able to argue at all.
Mere Christianity
To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable, because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.
Essays on Forgiveness
Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.
‘Equality’ in The Spectator
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.
Mere Christianity
If God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it's like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.
The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis
All mortals tend to turn into the thing they are pretending to be.
The Screwtape Letters
To walk out of His will is to walk into nowhere.
Perelandra
Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea, until they have something to forgive.
Mere Christianity
In the long run the answer to all those who object to the doctrine of hell, is itself a question: What are you asking God to do? To wipe out their past sins and, at all costs, to give them a fresh start, smoothing every difficulty and offering every miraculous help? But He has done so, on Calvary. To forgive them? They will not be forgiven. To leave them alone? Alas, I am afraid that is what He does.
The Problem of Pain
If the Divine call does not make us better, it will make us very much worse. Of all bad men, religious bad men are the worst. Of all created beings, the wickedest is one who originally stood in the immediate presence of God.
Reflections on the Psalms
In our own case we accept excuses too easily; in other people's, we do not accept them easily enough.
The Weight of Glory
It is safe to tell the pure in heart that they shall see God, for only the pure in heart want to.
The Problem of Pain
If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.
Mere Christianity
Jesus Christ did not say, ‘Go into all the world and tell the world that it is quite right.’
God in the Dock
Each day we are becoming a creature of splendid glory or one of unthinkable horror.
Mere Christianity
We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.
The Abolition of Man
When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world.
Mere Christianity
There is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to Him and bad when it turns from Him.
The Great Divorce
I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions but not hate the bad man: or, as they would say, hate the sin but not the sinner … I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life—namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things.
Mere Christianity
I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.
The Weight of Glory
We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.
The Problem of Pain