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| C. S. Lewis
A man can no more diminish God's glory by refusing to worship Him than a lunatic can put out the sun by scribbling the word, 'darkness' on the walls of his cell. A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride. A young man who wishes to remain a sound atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. An explanation of cause is not a justification by reason. Bridge-players tell me that there must be some
money on the game "or else people won't take it
seriously." Apparently it's like that. Your
bid--for God or no God, for a good God or the
Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity--
will not be serious if nothing much is staked
on it.
And you will never discover how serious it was
until the stakes are raised horribly high; until
you find that you are playing not for counters
or for sixpences but for every penny you have
in the world.Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable. Columbus, a man of lofty mind, with missionary and
scientific interests, had the original idea of
acting on the age-old doctrine of the earth's
rotundity and sailing west to find the east.
Lands which no one had dreamed of barred his way.
Though we all know, we often forget, that the
existence of America was one of the greatest
disappointments in the history of Europe. . . .
The English. . . had to content themselves with
colonization, which they conceived chiefly as a
social sewerage system, a vent for "needy people
who now trouble the commonwealth" and are "daily
consumed with the gallows."Critics who treat "adult" as a term of approval,
instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be
adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown
up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up,
to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these
things are the marks of childhood and adolescence.
And in childhood and adolescence they are, in
moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought
to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life
or even into early manhood this concern about being
adult is a mark of really arrested development.
When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and
would have been ashamed if I had been found doing
so. Now that I am fifty, I read them openly. When
I became a man I put away childish things, including
the fear of childishness and the desire to be grown up.Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil. Every poem can be considered in two ways--as what the poet has to say, and as a thing which he makes. Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, What! You, too? I thought I was the only one. God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing. How incessant and great are the ills with which a prolonged old age is replete. I believe in Christianity as I believe in the sun--not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. If we really think that home is elsewhere and that this life is a wandering to find home, why should we not look forward to the arrival? It's so much easier to pray for a bore than to go and see one. Miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. Mortal lovers must not try to remain at the first step; for lasting passion is the dream of a harlot and from it we wake in despair. No Christian and, indeed, no historian could accept the epigram which defines religion as 'what a man does with his solitude.' Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. Our Father refreshes us on the journey with some
pleasant inns, but will not encourage us to mistake
them for home.
Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion of Christ. Thirty was so strange for me. I've really had to come to terms with the fact that I am now a walking and talking adult. This is one of the miracles of love: It gives a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted. What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step. What we call Man's power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument. What you see and hear depends a good deal on where
you are standing; it also depends on what sort of
person you are.
You are never too old to set another goal or to dream a new dream. You can't get a cup of tea big enough or a book long enough to suit me. You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body. |
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