I want to start by saying something that I would like every one to notice carefully. It is this. If this chapter means nothing to you, if it seems to be trying to answer questions you never asked, drop it at once. Do not bother about it at all. There are certain [...]
Archive for the ‘C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII)’ Category
CHAPTER 22: FAITH
Posted in C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII) on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Chapter 21: FAITH
Posted in C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII) on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I must talk in this chapter about what the Christians call Faith. Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it means simply Belief -accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity. That [...]
CHAPTER 20: HOPE
Posted in C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII) on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do. It does not mean that we are to leave the present world [...]
CHAPTER 19: CHARITY
Posted in C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII) on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I said in an earlier chapter that there were four `Cardinal’ virtues and three ‘Theological’ virtues. The three Theological ones are Faith, Hope, and Charity. Faith is going to be dealt with in the last two chapters. Charity was partly dealt with in Chapter 7, but there I concentrated on that part of Charity which [...]
CHAPTER 18: THE GREAT SIN
Posted in C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII) on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals. There is one vice of which no man in the world is free; which every one in the world loathes when he sees it in someone else; and of which hardly any people, except Christians, ever imagine [...]
CHAPTER 17: FORGIVENESS
Posted in C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII) on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. But I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. It is laid down in the Christian rule, ‘Thou shaft love thy neighbour as thyself.’ Because in Christian morals ‘thy neighbour’ includes ‘thy [...]
CHAPTER 16: CHRISTIAN MARRIAGE
Posted in C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII) on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The last chapter was mainly negative. I discussed what was wrong with the sexual impulse in man, but said very little about its right working – in other words, about Christian marriage. There are two reasons why I do not particularly want to deal with marriage. The first is that the Christian doctrines on this [...]
CHAPTER 15: SEXUAL MORALITY
Posted in C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII) on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
We must now consider Christian morality as regards sex, what Christians call the virtue of chastity. The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of ‘modesty’ (in one sense of that word); i.e. propriety, or decency. The social rule of propriety lays down how much of the human body should [...]
CHAPTER 14: MORALITY AND PSYCHOANALYSIS
Posted in C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII) on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I have said that we should never get a Christian society unless most of us became Christian individuals. That does not mean, of course, that we can put off doing anything about society until some imaginary date in the far future. It means that we must begin both jobs at once –(1) the job of [...]
CHAPTER 13: SOCIAL MORALITY
Posted in C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII) on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what every one, at bottom, had always known [...]
CHAPTER 12: THE ‘CARDINAL VIRTUES’
Posted in C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII) on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The previous section was originally composed to be given as a short talk on the air.
If you are allowed to talk for only ten minutes, pretty well everything else has to be sacrificed to brevity. One of my chief reasons for dividing morality up into three parts (with my picture of the ships sailing in [...]
CHAPTER 11: THE THREE PARTS OF MORALITY
Posted in C.S. Lewis on Mere Christianity (BookIII) on January 26, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was ‘the sort of person who is always snooping round to see if anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it’. And I am afraid that [...]
