C.S. Lewis

You can__ see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can__, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can__ get the best out of it. __ow! Let__ have a real good talk_ reduces everyone to silence. __ must get a good sleep tonight_ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about our dead? __hem as asks_ (at any rate __s asks too importunately_) don__ get. Perhapscan__.

His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him. But we want a man hag-ridden by the Future__aunted by visions of an imminent heaven or hell upon earth__eady to break the Enemy__ commands in the present if by so doing we make him think he can attain the one or avert the other__ependent for his faith on the success or failure of schemes whose end he will not live to see. We want a whole race perpetually in pursuit of the rainbow__ end, never honest, nor kind, nor happy now, but always using as mere fuel wherewith to heap the altar of the future every real gift which is offered them in the Present.

You can__ see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can__, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can__ get the best out of it. __ow! Let__ have a real good talk_ reduces everyone to silence. __ must get a good sleep tonight_ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wastedon a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about our dead? __hem as asks_ (at any rate __s asks too importunately_) don__ get. Perhapscan__.

We...advance toward a state of society in which not only each man but every impulse in each man claims carte blanche.

You can__ see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. You can__, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can__ get the best out of it. __ow! Let__ have a real good talk_ reduces everyone to silence. __ must get a good sleep tonight_ ushers in hours of wakefulness. Delicious drinks are wasted on a really ravenous thirst. Is it similarly the very intensity of the longing that draws the iron curtain, that makes us feel we are staring into a vacuum when we think about our dead? __hem as asks_ (at any rate __s asks too importunately_) don__ get. Perhaps can__.

We have two bits of evidence about the Somebody [behind the Moral Law]. One is the universe He has made. If we used that as our only clue, then I think we should have to conclude that He was a great artist (for the universe is a very beautiful place), but also that He is quite merciless and no friend to man (for the universe is a very dangerous and terrifying place). The other bit of evidence is that Moral Law which He has put into our minds. And this is a better bit of evidence than the other, because it is inside information. You find out more about God from the Moral Law than from the universe in general just as you find out more about a man by listening to his conversation than by looking at a house he has built.

[God] sees before Him in fact a self-centred, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal. But He says "Let us pretend that this is not a mere creature, but our Son. It is like Christ in so far as it is a Man, for He became Man. Let us pretend that it is also like Him in Spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to make the pretence into a reality." God looks at you as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one. I daresay this idea of a divine makebelieve sounds rather strange at first. But, is it so strange really? Is not that how 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.

I remember once when I had been giving a talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, ____e no use for all that stuff. But, mind you, I__ a religious man too. I know there__ a God. I__e felt Him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that__ just why I don__ believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who__ met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!__ow in a sense I quite agreed with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the beach if you want to get to America.

The trouble about God is that he is like a person who never acknowledges your letters and so in time you come to the conclusion either that he does not exist or that you have got his address wrong.

Every Christian is to become a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, in the end, "Thy will be done." All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it. Those who seek find. To those who knock it is opened.

It is no more possible for God than for the weakest of His creatures to carry out both of two mutually exclusive alternatives; not because His power meets an obstacle, but because nonsense remains nonsense even when we talk it about God.- The Problem of Pain, p. 18

God's presence is not the same as the feeling of God's presence and He may be doing most for us when we think He is doing least.

No doubt he must very soon realize that his own faith is in direct opposition to the assumptions on which all the conversation of his new friends is based. I don't think that matters much provided that you can persuade him to postpone any open acknowledge of the fact, and this, with the aid of shame, pride, modesty and vanity, will be easy to do. As long as the postponement lasts he will be in a false position. He will be silent when he ought to speak and laugh when he ought to be silent.

It must be the full confession by Christendom of Christendom's specific contribution to the sum of human cruelty and treachery.

Make no mistake,' He says, 'if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that. You have free will, and if you choose, you can push Me away. But if you do not push Me away, understand that I am going to see this job through. Whatever suffering it may cost you in your earthly life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost you after death, whatever it costs Me, I will never rest, nor let you rest, until you are literally perfect - until my Father can say without reservation that He is well pleased with you, as He said He was well pleased with me. This I can do and will do. But I will not do anything less.

Since I am I, I must make an act of self-surrender, however small or however easy, in living to God rather than to my self.

I hope I do not offend God by making my Communions in the frame of mind I have been describing. The command, after all, was Take, eat: not Take, understand.