h
a pleasure that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco. ...

        8. The Great Sin


     Today I 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 that they are guilty themselves. I have heard people admit that they
are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or drink,
or  even  that they are cowards. I do not think I have ever heard anyone who
was not a Christian accuse himself of this vice. And at the same time I have
very seldom  met anyone, who was not  a Christian, who showed  the slightest
mercy  to it in others. There is  no fault which makes a man more unpopular,
and no fault which We are more unconscious of in ourselves. And the  more we
have it ourselves, the more we dislike it in others.
     The vice I  am  talking  of  is Pride or Self-Conceit: and  the  virtue
opposite to  it, in Christian morals,  is called Humility. You may remember,
when I was talking about sexual morality, I warned  you  that the  centre of
Christian morals  did not lie there. Well,  now, we have come to the centre.
According to Christian  teachers,  the essential  vice, the utmost  evil, is
Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed,  drunkenness,  and  all that, are mere flea
bites  in comparison:  it was through Pride that the devil became the devil:
Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.
     Does this seem  to you exaggerated? If so, think it over. I pointed out
a moment  ago  that the more pride one had, the more one  disliked pride  in
others. In fact, if you  want to find out how  proud you are the easiest way
is to ask yourself, "How much do I dislike  it when other people snub me, or
refuse to take any  notice of me, or shove their oar in, or patronise me, or
show off?"  The point it that each person's  pride  is  in  competition with
every  one else's pride. It is  because I wanted to be the big noise at  the
party that I am  so annoyed at someone else  being  the  big noise. Two of a
trade never  agree.  Now what  you  want  to  get  clear  is that  Pride  is
essentially  competitive-is competitive by its very nature-while  the  other
vices  are competitive only, so to speak, by accident Pride gets no pleasure
out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We
say that people are  proud of being  rich,  or clever,  or good-looking, but
they are not  They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking
than  others.  If  every  one  else  became  equally  rich,  or  clever,  or
good-looking there  would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison
that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element
of  competition has gone, pride has gone. That is  why I  say  that Pride is
essentially competitive in a way the other vices are not. The sexual impulse
may drive two men into competition if they both want the same girl  But that
is only  by accident; they might  just as  likely  have wanted two different
girls. But a proud man  will take your girl from you,  not because  he wants
her, but  just to prove to himself  that he is a better  man than you. Greed
may drive men into competition if there is  not enough to go  round; but the
proud  man, even when he has got more than he can possibly want, will try to
get still more just to assert his power. Nearly all those evils in the world
which people put down to greed or selfishness are really far more the result
of Pride.
     Take it with money. Greed will certainly make a man want money, for the
sake of a better house, better holidays, better things to eat and drink. But
only up to a point What is it dial makes a man  with  ?10,000 a year anxious
to get ?20,000 a year? It  is  not the greed for more pleasure. ?10,000 will
give all the luxuries that any man can really enjoy. It is Pride-the wish to
be richer than  some other rich man,  and (still more) the  wish  for power.
For, of course, power  is what Pride really enjoys: there is nothing makes a
man feel so  superior to others  as  being  able to move them about like toy
soldiers.  What  makes  a  pretty  girl spread misery  wherever she goes  by
collecting admirers? Certainly not her sexual instinct: that kind of girl is
quite often sexually frigid. It is Pride. What is it that makes  a political
leader or a whole nation go on and on, demanding more and more? Pride again.
Pride is competitive by its very nature: that is why it goes on and on. If I
am a proud man, then,  as long as there  is one  man in the whole world more
powerful, or richer, or cleverer than I, he is my rival and my enemy.
     The Christians are right: it is Pride which has been the chief cause of
misery in every nation  and  every family since the world began. Other vices
may  sometimes bring people together: you may find good fellowship and jokes
and friendliness among drunken people  or unchaste people.  But Pride always
means  enmity-it  is  enmity.  And not only enmity  between man and man, but
enmity to God.
     In  God  you  come  up  against  something  which  is in every  respect
immeasurably  superior  to  yourself.  Unless  you  know  God  as  that-and,
therefore, know yourself as nothing  in comparison-  you do  not know God at
all.  As  long as  you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is  always
looking  down on  things and people: and, of  course, as  long  as  you  are
looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.
     That  raises a terrible question. How is it that people  who are  quite
obviously  eaten up with Pride  can  say they believe in God  and appear  to
themselves very  religious? I am  afraid it  means they  are  worshipping an
imaginary God.  They  theoretically admit themselves  to be  nothing  in the
presence of this phantom God,  but are really all  the time imagining how He
approves  of them and thinks them  far better than ordinary people: that is,
they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility  to  Him  and get  out  of it  a
pound's worth of Pride towards  their  fellow-men. I suppose it was of those
people Christ was thinking when He said that some would preach about Him and
cast out devils in His name, only to be told at the end of the world that He
had never known them. And any of us may at any moment be in this death-trap.
Luckily,  we have a test Whenever  we find that our religious life is making
us feel  that we are good-above all,  that we are better than someone else-I
think we may  be  sure that we are  being acted on,  not by  God, but by the
devil  The  real test of being  in the presence  of  God is that you  either
forget about  yourself altogether  or see yourself as a small, dirty object.
It is better to forget about yourself altogether.
     It is a terrible thing  that  the worst of  all  the vices  can smuggle
itself  into the very centre of our religious life. But you can see why. The
other,  and  less bad, vices  come from the devil working on us  through our
animal nature. But  this does  not come through our animal nature  at all It
comes direct from Hell. It is  purely spiritual: consequently it is far more
subtle and deadly. For the same reason, Pride can often be used to beat down
the simpler vices. Teachers, in fact,  often appeal to a boy's Pride, or, as
they call it, his self-respect, to make him behave  decently: many a man has
overcome cowardice, or lust, or  ill-temper by learning to  think that  they
are beneath his dignity-that is, by Pride. The devil laughs. He is perfectly
content to see you becoming chaste  and brave and self-con trolled provided,
all the time,  he is setting  up in you the Dictatorship of Pride-just as he
would be quite content  to see your chilblains cured if he was  allowed,  in
return, to give you cancer. For Pride is spiritual  cancer:  it eats up  the
very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.
     Before  leaving  this  subject  I  must  guard  against  some  possible
misunderstandings:
     (1)  Pleasure in being praised is not Pride. The child who is patted on
the back  for doing a lesson well, the woman  whose beauty is praised by her
lover, the saved soul to whom Christ says "Well done," are pleased and ought
to be. For here the pleasure lies not in what you are but in the  fact  that
you  have  pleased someone you wanted (and rightly  wanted)  to  please. The
trouble  begins when you pass from thinking,  "I have  pleased  him;  all is
well," to thinking, "What a fine person I must be to have done it." The more
you  delight in  yourself and the less you delight in the  praise, the worse
you are becoming. When you delight wholly in yourself and  do not care about
the praise  at all, you have reached the bottom. That is why vanity,  though
it is the sort of Pride which shows most on the surface, is really the least
bad  and most  pardonable  sort.  The  vain  person  wants praise, applause,
admiration, too much  and  is always  angling for  it. It is a fault,  but a
childlike and even (in an odd way) a humble fault. It shows that you are not
yet completely contented with  your own admiration.  You  value other people
enough to want them to look at you. You are, in fact, still human. The  real
black, diabolical Pride comes when  you look down on others so much that you
do not care what they think of you.  Of course, it is very right,  and often
our duty,  not to  care what people think of us, if we do  so  for the right
reason; namely, because we care  so incomparably  more what God  thinks. But
the Proud man has a different reason  for not  caring. He says "Why should I
care for  the  applause  of  that rabble  as  if their  opinion  were  worth
anything? And even if their opinions were of value, am  I the sort of man to
blush  with pleasure at a  compliment like some  chit of a girl at her first
dance?  No, I am  an integrated, adult personality. All I have done has been
done to satisfy my own ideals-or my artistic conscience-or the traditions of
my family- or, in a word, because I'm That Kind of Chap. If the mob like it,
let them. They're nothing to me." In this  way real  thoroughgoing Pride may
act  as a check on vanity;  for, as I  said a  moment ago, the  devil  loves
"curing"  a  small fault by giving you a great  one. We must try not  to  be
vain, but we must  never call  in our Pride  to  cure our vanity; better the
frying-pan than the fire.
     (2) We say in English that a man is "proud" of  his son, or his father,
or his school, or  regiment,  and it may  be  asked whether "pride" in  this
sense  is a sin. I think it depends on what, exactly, we mean by "proud of."
Very  often,  in  such  sentences, the phrase  "is  proud of" means  "has  a
warm-hearted admiration for." Such  an  admiration  is, of  course, very far
from being a sin. But it  might,  perhaps, mean that the  person in question
gives  himself airs on the ground of his distinguished father, or because he
belongs to a famous  regiment. This would,  clearly,  be a fault;  but  even
then,  it would  be better than being proud simply  of  himself. To love and
admire  anything  outside  yourself  is to  take  one step away  from  utter
spiritual ruin;  though we  shall not be  well so long as we love and admire
anything more than we love and admire God.
     (3)  We  must  not  think Pride is something  God forbids because He is
offended at it, or that  Humility is something He  demands as due to His own
dignity-as if God Himself  was  proud. He is not in the  least worried about
His  dignity. The  point is,  He wants you to know  Him; wants to  give  you
Himself. And He and you are two things of such a kind that if you really get
into any kind of touch  with  Him  you will, in fact, be  humble-delightedly
humble,  feeling the  infinite relief of having for once got rid of all  the
silly nonsense about  your  own  dignity  which  has  made you restless  and
unhappy all your life. He is trying to make you humble in order to make this
moment  possible: trying to take off a lot  of  silly, ugly, fancy-dress  in
which we have all got ourselves up and are strutting about  like the  little
idiots we  are. I wish  I had  got a bit further with humility myself: if  I
had, I could probably tell you more about the relief, the comfort, of taking
the fancy-dress off-getting rid of the false self, with all its "Look at me"
and  "Aren't  I a good  boy?"  and all its posing and posturing. To get even
near it,  even for  a moment, is like a drink of cold water  to  a man in  a
desert.
     (4) Do not imagine that if you meet a really humble man he will be what
most people call "humble" nowadays: he  will not be a sort of greasy, smarmy
person,  who is always telling you that, of course, he is  nobody.  Probably
all you will  think about him is that he seemed a cheerful, intelligent chap
who took a real interest in what you  said  to him. If you do dislike him it
will be because you feel  a little envious of anyone who seems to enjoy life
so easily. He will not be thinking about humility:  he will not be  thinking
about himself at all.
     If anyone  would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the
first step.  The  first step is to realise  that one is proud. And a biggish
step, too. At  least,  nothing whatever  can be done before it. If you think
you are not conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed.

        9. Charity


     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 is  called Forgiveness.  I now want to add  a  little
more.
     First,  as to the meaning of  the word. "Charity" now means simply what
used  to be called "alms"-that is, giving to  the  poor. Originally it had a
much wider  meaning. (You can see how  it got the modern sense. If a man has
"charity," giving to the poor is one of the most obvious things he does, and
so people  came to talk as if that were the whole of charity.  In  the  same
way, "rhyme" is the  most obvious thing about poetry, and  so people come to
mean by "poetry" simply rhyme and nothing more.) Charity means "Love, in the
Christian  sense."  But love,  in  the  Christian  sense, does  not mean  an
emotion.  It is a state not  of the  feelings but of the will; that state of
the will  which we  have naturally about  ourselves,  and must learn to have
about other people.
     I pointed out in the chapter on Forgiveness that our love for ourselves
does not mean that we like ourselves. It means that we wish our own good. In
the  same  way  Christian Love (or  Charity)  for our  neighbours is quite a
different thing from liking or affection.  We "like" or  are "fond  of" some
people, and  not of others. It is important  to understand that this natural
"liking" is  neither  a  sin  nor a virtue,  any more  than  your likes  and
dislikes in  food are a sin or a virtue. It is just a fact  But,  of course,
what we do about it is either sinful or virtuous.
     Natural  liking  or  affection  for  people  makes   it  easier  to  be
"charitable" towards  them. It is,  therefore,  normally a duty to encourage
our affections-to "like"  people as much as we can  (just as it is often our
duty  to encourage our  liking for exercise or wholesome  food)-not  because
this liking is itself  the virtue of charity, but because it is a help to it
On  the  other hand, it is also  necessary to keep a very sharp look-out for
fear our liking  for some  one person makes us uncharitable, or even unfair,
to someone  else. There are even cases  where our liking  conflicts with our
charity towards  the person we like. For example,  a  doting  mother may  be
tempted by  natural affection to "spoil" her  child; that is, to gratify her
own affectionate impulses at the expense of the child's real happiness later
on.
     But though natural  likings should  normally be encouraged, it would be
quite wrong  to think that the way to become charitable  is to sit trying to
manufacture  affectionate feelings. Some  people are  "cold" by temperament;
that may be a misfortune for them, but it is no more a sin than having a bad
digestion is a  sin; and it does not cut them out from the chance, or excuse
them from the duty, of learning charity. The rule for all of us is perfectly
simple. Do  not waste time bothering  whether you "love" your neighbour; act
as if  you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When
you  are behaving  as if you loved someone, you will presently  come to love
him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him
more. If  you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less.
There is,  indeed, one exception. If  you do  him a good turn, not to please
God and obey the law of charity, but to show him  what a fine forgiving chap
you are, and to put  him  in  your debt, and then sit  down to wait  for his
"gratitude," you will  probably be disappointed. (People are not fools: they
have  a  very quick eye for  anything like showing off, or  patronage.)  But
whenever we do  good to  another self, just because it is a self, made (like
us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall  have
learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.
     Consequently,  though Christian  charity  sounds  a  very cold thing to
people  whose  heads  are full of sentimentality, and  though  it  is  quite
distinct from affection, yet it leads to affection. The difference between a
Christian and a  worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections
or "likings" and the Christian  has only  "charity." The  worldly man treats
certain  people kindly because he  "likes"  them: the  Christian,  trying to
treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes
on-including people  he could  not even have imagined himself liking  at the
beginning.
     This same spiritual  law works terribly in the opposite  direction. The
Germans, perhaps, at  first ill-treated the  Jews because they  hated  them:
afterwards they hated  them much more because they had ill-treated them. The
more cruel you are, the  more you will hate; and the more you hate, the more
cruel you will become-and so on in a vicious circle for ever.
     Good  and  evil both  increase at  compound interest.  That is  why the
little decisions you and I make every day are  of such infinite  importance.
The smallest good act today is the  capture of a strategic point from which,
a few months later,  you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed
of. An apparently trivial indulgence in lust or anger today is the loss of a
ridge  or railway line or bridgehead  from  which the  enemy  may  launch an
attack otherwise impossible.
     Some writers use the word charity to  describe  not only Christian love
between human beings, but  also God's love for  man and man's love  for God.
About the second  of these two, people are often worried. They are told they
ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are
they to do? The answer is the same as before.  Act as if you did. Do not sit
trying to  manufacture feelings. Ask yourself,  "If I were sure that I loved
God, what would I do?" When you have found the answer, go and do it.
     On the whole, God's love for us is a much  safer subject to think about
than  our love for Him. Nobody can  always have devout feelings: and even if
we could, feelings are not what God principally cares about. Christian Love,
either towards  God  or  towards man, is an  affair of the will. If  we  are
trying to do His  will  we are obeying the commandment, "Thou shalt love the
Lord  thy  God." He will  give us feelings of love if  He pleases. We cannot
create them for  ourselves, and we must not  demand them as a right. But the
great thing  to remember is that, though our feelings come and go,  His love
for us  does not. It  is not wearied  by our sins, or our indifference; and,
therefore,  it  is  quite relentless in its  determination that we  shall be
cured of those sins, at whatever cost to us, at whatever cost to Him.

        10. Hope


     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 as it
is. If  you read history you will find that the  Christians who did most for
the present world were just those who thought  most of the next The Apostles
themselves, who  set  on foot the conversion of  the Roman Empire, the great
men who built up the Middle Ages, the English Evangelicals who abolished the
Slave  Trade, all left  their  mark on Earth, precisely because their  minds
were occupied with  Heaven.  It  is since  Christians have largely ceased to
think of the other world  that  they have become so ineffective in this. Aim
at Heaven and you will get  earth "thrown in": aim at earth and you will get
neither. It seems a strange rule, but something like it can be seen at  work
in other matters. Health is a great blessing, but the moment you make health
one of your  main, direct  objects you start becoming a crank and  imagining
there  is  something  wrong  with  you. You are  only  likely to get  health
provided  you want other things more -food, games,  work,  fun, open air. In
the same  way, we shall  never save civilisation as long as  civilisation is
our main object. We must learn to want something else even more.
     Most of us find it very difficult  to want "Heaven" at all-except in so
far as "Heaven" means meeting  again our  friends who  have died. One reason
for this difficulty  is  that we have  not been trained: our whole education
tends to fix our minds on this world. Another reason  is that when the  real
want for Heaven is  present in us,  we do  not recognise it Most  people, if
they had really learned to look  into their own hearts, would know that they
do want, and want acutely, something that cannot be had in this world. There
are all sorts of things in this world that offer to give it to you, but they
never quite keep their promise. The longings which arise in us when we first
fall in love, or first  think of some foreign country, or first take up some
subject  that excites  us,  are longings which no marriage,  no  travel,  no
learning,  can  really  satisfy.  I  am not now speaking of  what  would  be
ordinarily called unsuccessful marriages, or holidays, or learned careers. I
am speaking of the best possible ones. There was something we grasped at, in
that first moment of longing, which  just fades away in the reality. I think
everyone knows what I mean. The wife may be a good wife, and the  hotels and
scenery  may  have been excellent,  and chemistry may be  a very interesting
job:  but something  has evaded us. Now there are  two wrong ways of dealing
with this fact, and one right one.
     (1) The Fool's Way.-He puts the blame on the things themselves. He goes
on all  his life thinking that if only he tried another woman, or went for a
more expensive holiday, or whatever  it is, then, this time, he really would
catch  the  mysterious  something  we  are  all  after. Most of  the  bored,
discontented,  rich people in the  world are of this type.  They spend their
whole lives trotting from woman  to woman (through the divorce courts), from
continent to continent, from hobby to hobby, always thinking that the latest
is "the Real Thing" at last, and always disappointed.
     (2) The Way of  the Disillusioned "Sensible Man."-He soon decides  that
the whole thing was moonshine. "Of  course,"  he says, "one feels  like that
when one's young. But by the time you get  to my age you've given up chasing
the rainbow's end." And so he settles down and learns not to expect too much
and represses the part of himself which used,  as he would say, "to cry  for
the moon." This is, of course, a much better way than the first, and makes a
man much happier, and less of a  nuisance to society. It tends to make him a
prig (he is apt to be rather  superior towards what he calls "adolescents"),
but, on the whole,  he rubs along  fairly comfortably. It would be the  best
line  we could take  if man did not  live for  ever.  But supposing infinite
happiness  really is  there, waiting for us? Supposing one  really can reach
the rainbow's end? In that case it would be  a pity to find out too  late (a
moment  after death) that by our supposed  "common sense" we had  stifled in
ourselves the faculty of enjoying it.
     (3) The Christian Way.-The Christian says, "Creatures are not born with
desires unless satisfaction  for  those desires exists. A  baby feels hunger
well, there is such a  thing as food. A duckling  wants to swim: well, there
is such a thing as water. Men feel  sexual  desire: well,  there is  such  a
thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world
can satisfy, the most probable explanation is  that I  was made for  another
world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it, that  does not prove that
the universe is  a fraud.  Probably earthly pleasures  were  never  meant to
satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so,
I must take  care, on the  one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for,
these earthly blessings, and  on the  other, never  to mistake them  for the
something else  of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I
must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I  shall not
find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside;
I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and
to help others to do the same."
     There is no  need to be worried by facetious people who try to make the
Christian  hope of "Heaven" ridiculous by saying they do not want  "to spend
eternity playing harps."  The answer  to such people is that if they  cannot
understand books written for grown-ups, they should not talk about them. All
the scriptural imagery (harps, crowns, gold, etc.) is, of  course, a  merely
symbolical  attempt  to  express the inexpressible. Musical instruments  are
mentioned because for many people (not all) music is the thing known in  the
present life  which most strongly suggests ecstasy and  infinity. Crowns are
mentioned to suggest the fact that those who are united with God in eternity
share His  splendour and power  and joy. Gold  is  mentioned to suggest  the
timelessness of  Heaven (gold  does not rust) and  the  preciousness  of  it
People who take these symbols literally might as well think that when Christ
told us to be like doves, He meant that we were to lay eggs.

        11. Faith


     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 is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people-at least it
used to puzzle me-is the fact that Christians  regard faith in this sense as
a virtue, I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue-what  is there moral
or immoral about believing or not believing a set  of statements? Obviously,
I  used to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not  because he
wants  or does not want to,  but because the evidence  seems to him  good or
bad. If he were  mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that
would not mean he was a bad  man, but  only that he was not very clever. And
if  he  thought the evidence bad  but  tried to force himself to  believe in
spite of it, that would be merely stupid.
     Well, I think I still take that view.  But what I did not see then- and
a  good many people do  not see still-was  this. I was  assuming that if the
human  mind once  accepts a  thing  as true  it  will  automatically  go  on
regarding it as true, until some real reason for  reconsidering it turns up.
In fact, I was assuming that the  human mind is completely ruled  by reason.
But that is not so.  For  example, my reason  is perfectly convinced by good
evidence  that  anaesthetics  do  not smother me and that  properly  trained
surgeons do  not start operating until I am unconscious.  But that  does not
alter  the  fact  that when they have me down on  the table  and clap  their
horrible mask over my face, a mere childish panic  begins inside me. I start
thinking I am going to choke, and I am afraid they will start  cutting me up
before I am properly under. In other words, I lose my faith in anaesthetics.
It is not reason that is taking away my faith:  on the contrary, my faith is
based on reason. It  is my imagination  and emotions. The battle  is between
faith and reason on one side and emotion and imagination on the other.
     When  you think of it you will  see lots  of instances of  this.  A man
knows, on perfectly good evidence, that a pretty girl of his acquaintance is
a liar  and  cannot keep a secret  and ought not to be trusted;  but when he
finds himself with her his mind loses its faith in that bit of knowledge and
he  starts thinking,  "Perhaps she'll be different this time," and once more
makes a fool of himself and tells  her something  he ought not to  have told
her. His senses  and  emotions  have destroyed  his faith in what  he really
knows to be true. Or take a boy learning to swim. His reason knows perfectly
well that an unsupported human body will  not necessarily sink in  water: he
has seen dozens of people float and swim. But the whole question is  whether
he  will be able to go on  believing this when the instructor takes away his
hand  and  leaves  him unsupported in the water-or whether he  will suddenly
cease to believe it and get in a fright and go down.
     Now  just  the same thing happens about  Christianity. I  am not asking
anyone  to accept  Christianity  if his best reasoning  tells  him that  the
weight of the evidence  is against it. That is not the  point at which Faith
comes in.  But supposing a  man's reason once decides that the weight of the
evidence is  for it.  I can tell that man what is going to happen  to him in
the next few weeks. There  will come a moment when there is bad  news, or he
is in trouble, or is living  among a lot of other people who  do not believe
it, and all at once his emotions will rise up and carry out a sort of  blitz
on his belief.  Or else there will come a moment when  he wants a  woman, or
wants to tell a lie, or feels very pleased with himself, or sees a chance of
making a little money in some  way that is not perfectly fair: some  moment,
in fact, at which it would be very convenient if Christianity were not true.
And once  again his  wishes  and desires will carry  out  a blitz. I am  not
talking of moments at  which any real new  reasons against Christianity turn
up.  Those have  to  be faced and that  is a different matter. I am  talking
about moments where a mere mood rises up against it.
     Now Faith, in the sense in which I  am here using the  word, is the art
of holding on  to things your  reason  has once accepted,  in spite of  your
changing moods. For  moods will change, whatever  view your  reason takes. I
know that by experience.  Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which
the whole thing looks very improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods
in which Christianity looked terribly probable. This rebellion of your moods
against your real self is going to come anyway. That  is why Faith is such a
necessary virtue: unless you teach your moods "where they  get off," you can
never  be either  a sound Christian  or  even a  sound atheist, but  just  a
creature dithering to  and  fro,  with  its beliefs really dependent  on the
weather and  the  state  of its digestion. Consequently one must  train  the
habit of Faith.
     The first  step is to recognise the  fact that  your moods change.  The
next is to make sure that, if you have once accepted Christianity, then some
of its main doctrines shall be  deliberately held before your mind  for some
time every day. That  is why daily  prayers and religious reading and church
going are  necessary parts of the Christian life. We have to be  continually
reminded  of  what  we  believe.  Neither  this belief  nor any  other  will
automatically  remain alive in the mind. It must be fed.  And as a matter of
fact,  if  you examined  a  hundred  people  who  had  lost  their faith  in
Christianity, I wonder how many of them would turn out to have been reasoned
out of it by honest argument? Do not most people simply drift away?
     Now I must turn to Faith in the second or higher sense: and this is the
most difficult thing I have tackled yet. I want to approach it by going back
to the  subject  of  Humility.  You may remember I said that  the first step
towards humility was  to  realise that one is proud. I want to  add now that
the next step  is to make  some serious attempt to  practise  the  Christian
virtues. A week  is not enough. Things  often  go  swimmingly for the  first
week.  Try six weeks. By that time, having,  as far as one can  see,  fallen
back completely or even fallen lower than the point one began from, one will
have discovered  some truths about oneself. No man knows how bad he  is till
he has tried very  hard to be good. A silly idea is current that good people
do not know what  temptation means. This is an  obvious lie. Only those  who
try to resist temptation know how strong it is. After all, you  find out the
strength of the German army by fighting  against  it, not by  giving in. You
find out the  strength of a wind by trying to walk against it,  not by lying
down. A man  who  gives in to temptation after five minutes simply  does not
know what it would have been like an hour later. That is why bad people,  in
one sense, know very little about badness. They have  lived a sheltered life
by  always  giving in.  We never find out the strength of  the evil  impulse
inside us until we  try to fight it: and Christ, because He was the only man
who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the  full
what temptation means-the only complete realist.  Very well, then. The  main
thing  we learn from a serious  attempt to practise the Christian virtues is
that we fail. If  there was any idea that God had set us a sort of exam, and
that we might get good marks by deserving them, that has to be wiped out. If
there was any idea  of a sort  of bargain-any idea that we could perform our
side of the contract and thus put God in our debts so that it was up to Him,
in mere justice, to perform His side-that has to be wiped out.
     I think every one who has some vague belief in God, until he  becomes a
Christian, has the idea  of an exam,  or of a bargain in his mind. The first
result  of real Christianity is to blow that idea into  bits. When they find
it  blown  into bits, some  people think this means  that Christianity is  a
failure and give up. They seem to imagine that God is very simple-minded! In
fact,  of  course,  He  knows  all  about  this.  One  of  the  very  things
Christianity was designed  to do was to blow this idea to bits. God has been
waiting for  the moment at which you  discover that there is no question  of
earning a pass mark in this exam, or putting Him in your debt.
     Then comes  another discovery.  Every faculty  you have,  your power of
thinking or of moving your limbs from moment to moment, is given you by God.
If you devoted  every moment of  your whole life exclusively  to His service
you could not give Him anything  that was not in a sense His own already. So
that when we talk of a man doing anything for God or giving anything to God,
I will tell you what  it is really  like. It is like a small child going  to
its  father and  saying, "Daddy,  give  me  sixpence to buy you  a  birthday
present." Of course, the  father  does, and he  is pleased with the  child's
present. It is all very nice and proper,  but only an idiot would think that
the father  is sixpence to the good on  the transaction. When a man has made
these two discoveries God can really get to work. It is after this that real
life begins. The  man is awake now. We can now go on to talk of Faith in the
second sense.

        12. Faith


     I want  to  start by  saying  something that I would like  everyone  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 things in Christianity  that
can be understood from the outside,  before you have become a Christian. But
there are a great many things that cannot be understood until after you have
gone a certain distance  along the Christian  road.  These things are purely
practical, though they do not look as if  they were. They are directions for
dealing with particular cross-roads and obstacles on the journey and they do
not make sense  until a man has reached those places. Whenever you find  any
statement in Christian writings which you can make nothing of, do not worry.
Leave it alone. There  will  come  a  day,  perhaps  years later,  when  you
suddenly see what  it meant If one could understand it now, it would only do
one harm.
     Of course all this tells against me as much as anyone else. The thing I
am going  to try to  explain in this  chapter  may be ahead  of me. I may be
thinking  I  have got there when I  have not.  I  can  only  ask  instructed
Christians to watch  very carefully, and tell me when I go wrong; and others
to take what I  say with a grain of  salt- as something offered, because  it
may be a help, not because I am certain that I am right.
     I am  trying to talk about Faith in the second sense, the higher sense.
I said last week that the question of Faith in this sense arises after a man
has tried his level best to  practise the Christian virtues, and found  that
he fails, and seen that even if he could he would only be giving back to God
what was already  God's  own. In other words, he  discovers  his bankruptcy.
Now, once  again, what  God cares  about is not exactly our actions. What he
cares about is that we should be creatures of a certain kind or quality- the
kind  of creatures He  intended us to  be-creatures  related to Himself in a
certain way.  I do not  add "and related to one  another  in a certain way,"
because  that  is included: if you are right with Him you will inevitably be
right with all your  fellow-creatures, just as if all the  spokes of a wheel
are fitted rightly  into  the hub and  the  rim they  are bound to be in the
right  positions to one another. And  as long as a man is thinking of God as
an examiner  who has set him a sort of paper to do, or as the opposite party
in a  sort of bargain-as long as he is thinking  of claims and counterclaims
between himself and  God-he is  not yet in the right relation to Him. He  is
misunderstanding  what he  is  and what God is.  And he cannot  get into the
right relation until he has discovered the fact of our bankruptcy.
     When I say  "discovered," I  mean really discovered: not simply said it
parrot-fashion. Of  course, any child, if given a  certain kind of religious
education, will  soon learn to say that we have nothing to offer to God that
is not already His own and that we find ourselves failing to offer even that
without keeping something back. But I am talking of really discovering this:
really finding out by experience that it is true.
     Now  we cannot, in that sense,  discover our failure to keep God's  law
except by trying our  very hardest (and then failing). Unless we really try,
whatever we say there will always be at the back  of our minds the idea that
if we try harder next time we shall succeed in being completely good.  Thus,
in one  sense,  the  road back to God is a road  of moral effort,  of trying
harder and harder. But in another sense it is not  trying that is ever going
to bring us home. All this trying  leads up to the vital moment at which you
turn  to  God and say, "You must  do this. I can't." Do not,  I implore you,
start asking  yourselves, "Have I reached that  moment?" Do not sit down and
start watching your own mind to see if it is  coming along.  That puts a man
quite on the wrong track. When the most important  things in our life happen
we quite often do not know, at the  moment, what is going on. A man does not
always say to himself,  "Hullo! I'm  growing up." It is  often only  when he
looks back  that he realises  what has  happened and recognises it  as  what
people call "growing up." You can see it even in  simple matters.  A man who
starts anxiously watching to see whether he is going to sleep is very likely
to remain wide awake. As well, the thing I  am talking of now may not happen
to every one in a sudden flash-as  it did to St Paul or Bunyan: it may be so
gradual  that no  one  could  ever point to  a  particular  hour  or even  a
particular year. And what matters is the nature of the change in itself, not
how we  feel while  it is happening.  It is the change from  being confident
about our own efforts to the state in which we despair of doing anything for
ourselves and leave it to God.
     I know the words "leave it to God"  can be misunderstood, but they must
stay for the moment. The sense in which a Christian leaves it to God is that
he puts all his trust in Christ: trusts that Christ  will somehow share with
him  the perfect human obedience which He carried out  from His birth to His
crucifixion:  that  Christ  will make the  man more  like Himself  and, in a
sense, make good his deficiencies.  In Christian language, He will share His
"sonship"  with us, will make us, like Himself, "Sons of God": in Book  IV I
shall attempt to analyse the meaning of those words a little further. If you
like to put it that way, Christ offers something for nothing: He even offers
everything for nothing.  In a  sense, the whole Christian  life consists  in
accepting that very  remarkable offer. But  the difficulty is  to reach  the
point of recognising that  all we  have done and can do is nothing. What  we
should have liked would  be for God to count our good  points and ignore our
bad ones. Again, in a sense, you may say that no temptation is ever overcome
until we stop trying to overcome it- throw up the sponge. But then you could
not  "stop trying" in the right  way and for the  right reason until you had
tried your very hardest. And, in yet another sense,  handing everything over
to  Christ does  not, of  course, mean that you  stop  trying.  To trust Him
means, of course,  trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in
saying you trusted a person if you  would not take  his advice. Thus  if you
have really handed yourself over to Him, it must  follow that you are trying
to obey Him. But  trying  in a new way, a less  worried way. Not doing these
things in  order to be saved, but because He has begun  to save you already.
Not hoping to  get to  Heaven as  a  reward for your actions, but inevitably
wanting to  act  in a  certain  way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is
already inside you.
     Christians have often disputed as  to whether  what leads the Christian
home is good actions, or Faith in Christ. I have no right really to speak on
such a difficult question, but it does seem to me like asking which blade in
a  pair of scissors  is  most necessary.  A serious moral effort is the only
thing that will bring you to the point where you throw up  the sponge. Faith
in  Christ is the only thing to save you from despair at that point: and out
of that Faith in  Him  good  actions  must inevitably  come.  There are  two
parodies of the truth which different sets  of Christians have, in the past,
been  accused by other  Christians of  believing: perhaps they  may make the
truth clearer. One set were accused of  saying, "Good actions  are all  that
matters. The best good action is charity. The best kind of charity is giving
money. The best thing  to  give money  to  is  the Church.  So hand  us over
?10,000 and  we  will see  you through."  The answer  to  that  nonsense, of
course, would be that good  actions done for that motive, done with the idea
that  Heaven  can be  bought, would  not be good  actions at  all,  but only
commercial speculations. The other set were accused of saying, "Faith is all
that matters.  Consequently, if you have  faith, it doesn't  matter what you
do. Sin away, my lad, and have a good time and Christ will see that it makes
no difference  in the end." The answer to that nonsense is that, if what you
call your "faith" in Christ does not  involve taking the slightest notice of
what He says, then it is  not Faith at all-not faith or  trust in  Him,  but
only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him.
     The Bible really seems to clinch the matter when it puts the two things
together into one amazing sentence. The  first  half is, "Work out  your own
salvation  with fear and trembling"-which looks as if everything depended on
us and  our good actions:  but the  second half goes on, "For it is  God who
worketh in you"- which looks  as if God did everything  and we nothing. I am
afraid  that is  the sort of thing we  come up against in Christianity. I am
puzzled, but I am not surprised. You see, we are  now trying to  understand,
and  to  separate into  water-tight compartments, what  exactly God does and
what man does  when God  and  man are working together. And,  of course,  we
begin by  thinking  it is like two men  working together, so  that you could
say, "He did this bit and I did that." But this way of thinking breaks down.
God is not like that. He is inside  you as well as outside: even if we could
understand  who  did  what,  I do not  think  human language  could properly
express it. In  the attempt to express it  different Churches  say different
things.  But you will find that even those who insist  most strongly  on the
importance of good actions tell  you  you  need Faith;  and  even those  who
insist most strongly on Faith tell you to do good actions. At any  rate that
is as far as I go.
     I think  all Christians  would agree  with me  if  I  said  that though
Christianity seems at first to  be all about morality, all  about duties and
rules  and guilt  and virtue, yet it leads  you on, out of  all  that,  into
something beyond. One has a glimpse of  a  country where they do not talk of
those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled  full with
what  we  should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light But  they do
not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of
it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes. But this is
near  the stage  where  the road passes over the rim  of our world. No one's
eyes can see very far beyond that:  lots of  people's eyes can  see  further
than mine.

         * Book IV. Beyond Personality: Or First Steps In The Doctrine Of The Trinity



        1. Making and Begetting


     Everyone  has warned me not to tell you what I am  going to tell you in
this last book.  They  all say "the ordinary reader does  not want Theology;
give  him plain practical religion." I  have rejected their advice. I do not
think the  ordinary reader  is  such  a fool. Theology means "the science of
God," and I think any man who wants to think about God at all  would like to
have the clearest and most accurate ideas about Him which are available. You
are not children: why should you be treated like children?
     In a way I quite  understand why some people are put off by Theology. I
remember  once  when  I  had  been giving  a  talk  to  the  RA.F., an  old,
hard-bitten officer got  up and said, "I've no use  for all that stuff. But,
mind you,  I'm a religious man too. I know there's a God. I've felt Him: out
alone in the desert at night: the tremendous  mystery. And that's just why I
don't believe all your neat little  dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone
who's met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal!"
     Now 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
isolated 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.
     Now, Theology  is like the  map. Merely learning and thinking about the
Christian doctrines, if  you stop there, is less real and less exciting than
the sort  of thing my friend got  in the desert. Doctrines are not God: they
are only a  kind of map. But that map is based on the experience of hundreds
of people who really were  in touch with God-experiences compared with which
any thrills or  pious feelings you and I  are likely to  get on our own  are
very  elementary  and  very  confused. And  secondly, if you want to get any
further, you  must  use the map. You  see, what  happened to that man in the
desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but nothing comes  of
it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it In fact, that  is just
why  a vague  religion-all  about feeling God  in nature,  and so  on-is  so
attractive. It is all  thrills and no work; like watching the waves from the
beach. But you will not get to  Newfoundland  by studying  the Atlantic that
way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of God
in  flowers or music. Neither  will  you  get anywhere  by looking  at  maps
without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if  you go to sea  without a
map.
     In  other words, Theology is practical: especially now. In Ac old days,
when there was less education and discussion, perhaps it was possible to get
on with  a very few simple ideas about God. But it  is not  so now. Everyone
reads, everyone hears things discussed.  Consequently,  if you do not listen
to Theology, that will not mean  that  you have no  ideas about God. It will
mean that you have a lot  of wrong ones-bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For
a great many of the ideas  about  God which  are  trotted out  as  novelties
today, are  simply  the ones which real  Theologians tried centuries ago and
rejected.  To   believe  in  the  popular  religion  of  modern  England  is
retrogression-like believing the earth is fiat.
     For when you get down  to it, is not the  popular  idea of Christianity
simply this: that Jesus Christ was a great moral teacher and that if only we
took his advice we might be able to  establish  a  better  social  order and
avoid another war? Now, mind you, that  is quite true. But it tells you much
less than  the  whole  truth  about  Christianity  and  it has no  practical
importance at all.
     It  is quite true  that if we  took Christ's advice we  should  soon be
living in a happier world. You need not even  go as far as Christ. If we did
all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told us, we should  get on  a great
deal better than we do. And so what? We never have followed  the  advice  of
the great  teachers. Why are we likely to begin now? Why  are we more likely
to  follow  Christ  than any of the  others? Because he  is the  best  moral
teacher? But that makes it even less likely that  we shall follow him. If we
cannot  take the elementary lessons, is  it likely we  are going to take the
most advanced one? If Christianity  only means one  more bit of good advice,
then Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice
for the last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.
     But as soon as  you look at any real Christian writings,  you find that
they are talking about something quite different from this popular religion.
They say that Christ is the Son of God (whatever that  means). They say that
those who give Him  their confidence can also become Sons  of God  (whatever
that means). They say that His death saved  us from our sins (whatever  that
means).
     There  is no  good  complaining that  these  statements  are  difficult
Christianity  claims  to be  telling us about another world, about something
behind the  world we  can touch and  hear  and see. You may think  the claim
false;  but  if  it  were  true, what  it  tells us  would be  bound  to  be
difficult-at least as difficult as modern Physics, and for the same reason.
     Now the point in Christianity which gives us the greatest  shock is the
statement that by  attaching ourselves to  Christ, we  can  "become Sons  of
God." One asks "Aren't we Sons of God  already? Surely the fatherhood of God
is one of  the main Christian ideas?" Well, in a certain sense, no doubt  we
are sons of God already. I mean, God has brought us into existence and loves
us and looks after us, and in that way is  like a father. But when the Bible
talks  of our  "becoming" Sons of  God, obviously  it  must  mean  something
different. And that brings us up against the very centre of Theology.
     One  of  the creeds  says that Christ is the Son of God "begotten,  not
created"; and it  adds  "begotten by his Father before all worlds." Will you
please get it quite clear  that this has  nothing  to do  with the fact that
when Christ was born on earth as a man, that man was the son of a virgin? We
are not now thinking about the Virgin Birth. We are thinking about something
that happened before  Nature was created at all, before time  began. "Before
all worlds" Christ is begotten, not created. What does it mean?
     We  don't use the words  begetting or  begotten much in modern English,
but  everyone still  knows  what they mean. To beget is to become the father
of:  to create is  to make. And the difference is this. When  you beget, you
beget something of  the same kind as yourself. A man begets human babies,  a
beaver begets  little  beavers and a bird begets eggs which turn into little
birds. But when  you  make,  you make  something  of a  different  kind from
yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man makes a wireless
set-or he  may make  something more like himself than a wireless set: say, a
statue. If he is a clever enough carver  he may make  a statue which is very
like a man indeed. But, of  course, it is not a real man; it only looks like
one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.
     Now that is the first thing to get clear. What God begets  is God; just
as  what man begets is man.  What God creates  is not God; just as  what man
makes is not man. That is  why men are not Sons of  God in  the  sense  that
Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways, but they are not things  of
the same kind. They are more like statues or pictures of God.
     A statue  has the shape of a man but  it is not alive. In the same way,
man has  (in a sense I am going to explain) the "shape" or  likeness of God,
but he has  not got the kind of  life  God has. Let us  take the first point
(man's resemblance to God)  first. Everything God has made has some likeness
to Himself. Space is like  Him in  its  hugeness: not that the  greatness of
space is the same  kind of greatness as God's, but it is a sort of symbol of
it, or a translation of it into non-spiritual terms. Matter is  like  God in
having energy: though, again, of course, physical energy is a different kind
of thing from the power of God. The vegetable world  is like Him because  it
is alive, and He is the "living God." But life, in this biological sense, is
not the same as the  life there is in God:  it is only  a kind of  symbol or
shadow  of it.  When we  come  on  to the  animals, we find  other  kinds of
resemblance  in  addition  to  biological life.  The  intense  activity  and
fertility of the insects, for  example, is a first  dim  resemblance to  the
unceasing activity and the creativeness of God. In the higher mammals we get
the beginnings of instinctive  affection. That is not  the same thing as the
love that exists in God: but it is like it-rather in the  way that a picture
drawn on a flat piece of  paper can nevertheless be "like" a landscape. When
we  come  to  man,  the  highest  of  the animals,  we  get  the  completest
resemblance to God which we know of. (There may be creatures in other worlds
who are more like God  than man is, but we  do not know about them.) Man not
only lives, but loves and reasons: biological life reaches its highest known
level in him.
     But what  man,  in  his natural condition,  has not  got, is  Spiritual
life-the  higher and different sort of life that exists in God.  We use  the
same word life for both: but  if you thought that both must therefore be the
same  sort  of  thing, that would be like thinking  that the  "greatness" of
space  and  the  "greatness" of  God  were  the  same  sort of greatness. In
reality, the  difference between  Biological  life and spiritual life  is so
important that  I  am  going to give them two distinct names. The Biological
sort which comes  to us through Nature, and  which (like  everything else in
Nature) is always  tending to run down and decay so that it can only be kept
up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food, etc.,
is Bios. The Spiritual life  which is in  God from  all eternity, and  which
made the whole natural  universe, is Zoe. Bios has,  to  be sure, a  certain
shadowy or  symbolic resemblance  to  Zoe: but only  the sort of resemblance
there is between a photo  and  a  place, or  a statue  and a man. A  man who
changed from  having Bios  to having Zoe  would have gone through  as big  a
change as a statue which changed from being  a carved stone to being  a real
man.
     And that is precisely what Christianity is about. This world is a great
sculptor's  shop. We are the  statues and there is a  rumour going round the
shop that some of us are some day going to come to life.

        2. The Three-Personal God


     The last chapter was about the difference between begetting and making.
A man begets a child, but  he only makes a statue. God begets Christ  but He
only makes men. But by saying that, I have  illustrated only one point about
God, namely, that  what God the Father begets is God, something of  the same
kind as Himself.  In that  way it  is  like a human father begetting a human
son. But not quite like it. So I must try to explain a little more.
     A good many  people  nowadays say,  "I believe in a  God, but not in  a
personal God."  They feel that the mysterious something which is behind  all
other things must be more than a person. Now the Christians quite agree. But
the Christians are the only  people who offer any idea of  what a being that
is beyond personality could be like.  All the other people, though  they say
that God is beyond personality, really think of Him as something impersonal:
that  is, as something less than personal. If you are looking  for something
super-personal,  something more than a person, then it is not  a question of
choosing between the Christian  idea and the other ideas. The Christian idea
is the only one on the market.
     Again, some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several
lives, human souls will be "absorbed" into God. But when they try to explain
what they  mean, they seem to be  thinking of our being absorbed into God as
one  material thing is absorbed into  another. They say it is like a drop of
water slipping into the sea.  But of course  that is the end of the drop. If
that  is what  happens to us, then being absorbed  is the same as ceasing to
exist. It is only the Christians who have any idea of how human souls can be
taken into the life of God and yet remain  themselves-in fact, be very  much
more themselves than they were before.
     I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we
exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what  that
life is, will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask  you to
follow rather carefully.
     You know  that in space  you can move in three  ways-to left or  right,
backwards or  forwards,  up or down.  Every direction is either one of these
three or a  compromise between  them. They are called the  three Dimensions.
Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only  a
straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure: say, a square.
And a  square is made up of four straight lines. Now  a step further. If you
have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body, say,  a
cube-a thing like a dice or a lump of  sugar. And a  cube  is made up of six
squares.
     Do  you see the  point? A world of  one dimension would be  a  straight
line. In  a  two-dimensional world, you  still  get straight lines, but many
lines make  one  figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures
but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more
real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you
found on  the simpler  levels:  you still  have them,  but  combined in  new
ways-in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.
     Now the Christian account of God involves just the same  principle. The
human  level is  a simple and  rather empty  level. On  the human level  one
person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings-just as, in
two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper)  one square is one figure, and
any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find
personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who
do not live on that  level, cannot imagine. In God's dimension, so to speak,
you find  a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being,  just as a
cube is  six squares  while remaining  one cube. Of course we  cannot  fully
conceive a Being like that: just as,  if we were so  made that we  perceived
only  two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we
can  get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are  then, for the
first  time in  our  lives,  getting some positive idea,  however  faint, of
something super-personal-something  more  than a person. It  is something we
could never have guessed, and yet,  once we have been told, one almost feels
one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in  so well with all
the things we know already.
     You  may ask, "If we cannot imagine a three-personal Being, what is the
good of talking about Him?" Well,  there isn't  any  good talking about Him.
The  thing that matters  is being  actually  drawn into  that three-personal
life, and that may begin any time -tonight, if you like.
     What I mean is this. An ordinary  simple  Christian  kneels down to say
his prayers.  He  is  trying to get  into  touch  with God. But if he  is  a
Christian he knows  that  what is prompting him to pray is also God: God, so
to speak, inside  him. But he also knows that all  his real knowledge of God
comes through Christ, the  Man  who  was  God-that Christ is standing beside
him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is happening. God is
the thing to which he is praying-the goal he is trying to reach. God is also
the thing inside  him which is pushing him on-the motive power. God is  also
the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to  that goal. So that the
whole  threefold life of the  three-personal Being  is actually  going on in
that ordinary  little bedroom where an ordinary  man is saying his  prayers.
The man is being caught up into the higher kind of life-what I called Zoe or
spiritual life: he is being pulled  into God, by God,  while still remaining
himself.
     And that  is  how  Theology started. People already knew about God in a
vague way.  Then came a man who claimed to  be God; and yet he was  not  the
sort of man you could dismiss as a  lunatic. He made  them believe Him. They
met Him again after they had seen Him killed. And then, after they had  been
formed into  a  little society or community,  they found  God somehow inside
them as well: directing them, making  them able to do things they could  not
do before.  And when they worked  it all out  they found they had arrived at
the Christian definition of the three-personal God.
     This  definition is  not  something we have made up;  Theology is, in a
sense, experimental  knowledge.  It  is  the  simple religions that are  the
made-up ones. When  I say it is an experimental science "in a sense," I mean
that  it is like  the other experimental sciences in  some ways,  but not in
all. If you  are a geologist studying  rocks,  you  have to go and  find the
rocks.  They  will not  come to you, and if you go to them  they  cannot run
away.  The initiative lies  all on your side.  They  cannot  either  help or
hinder.  But  suppose you  are a zoologist and want  to take  photos of wild
animals in their native haunts. That is a bit different from studying rocks.
The wild animals  will  not come to  you:  but they can run  away from  you.
Unless you keep  very  quiet, they will. There  is  beginning to be  a  tiny
little trace of initiative on their side.
     Now a stage higher; suppose you want to get to know a human  person. If
he is  determined not to let you, you will not  get to know him. You have to
win his confidence. In this  case the initiative is equally divided-it takes
two to make a friendship.
     When  you come to knowing God, the  initiative lies on  His side. If He
does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to  find Him. And,
in fact, He shows much more of  Himself to some people  than  to  others-not
because  He has  favourites, but because it  is  impossible for Him  to show
Himself to a man whose whole  mind and character are in the wrong condition.
Just  as  sunlight,  though it has  no favourites, cannot be reflected  in a
dusty mirror as clearly as a clean one.
     You can put this another way by saying that while in other sciences the
instruments you use are things external to yourself (things like microscopes
and telescopes),  the instrument through which  you  see God  is  your whole
self. And if  a man's self is not kept clean and  bright, his glimpse of God
will be  blurred-like the Moon seen through a  dirty telescope. That  is why
horrible nations  have  horrible religions:  they have been looking  at  God
through a dirty lens.
     God can show Himself as He really  is only to  real men. And that means
not  simply  to  men who are  individually good,  but to  men who are united
together in  a body, loving one another, helping one another, showing Him to
one another. For that is what God meant humanity to be like; like players in
one band, or organs in one body.
     Consequently,  the one really adequate instrument  for  learning  about
God,  is the whole Christian community, waiting for Him  together. Christian
brotherhood is, so  to speak, the  technical equipment  for this science-the
laboratory outfit That is why all these people  who  turn up every few years
with some patent simplified religion of  their  own as a substitute  for the
Christian  tradition  are  really  wasting  time.  Like  a man  who  has  no
instrument but an old parr of field glasses setting out to put all  the real
astronomers right.  He may be a clever chap-he may be cleverer than some  of
the real astronomers, but he is not  giving himself  a chance. And two years
later everyone has forgotten  all about him,  but the real science is  still
going on.
     If Christianity  was something we  were making up,  of course  we could
make it easier. But it is not. We cannot compete, in simplicity, with people
who are inventing religions.  How could we?  We  are dealing  with  Fact. Of
course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to bother about.

        3. Time And Beyond Time


     It is a very silly idea that in reading  a book  you must never "skip."
All sensible people skip freely when they come to a chapter which they  find
is going to  be no use to them. In  this  chapter  I am  going to talk about
something which may be helpful to some readers, but which may seem to others
merely  an  unnecessary complication. If you are  one of the second sort  of
readers,  then I advise you not  to  bother about this chapter at all but to
turn on to the next.
     In the last chapter I had to touch  on the subject of prayer, and while
that  is still fresh in  your mind and  my own, I should like to deal with a
difficulty that  some people find about the whole idea of prayer. A man  put
it  to me  by saying  "I can believe in God  all  right, but  what  I cannot
swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings
who are all addressing Him at  the same moment." And I have found that quite
a lot of people feel this.
     Now, the first thing to notice  is that the whole sting of it comes  in
the words at the same moment.  Most  of us can imagine God  attending to any
number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an endless time
to do it in. So what is really at the back of this difficulty is the idea of
God having to fit too many things into one moment of time.
     Well that is of course what happens to us. Our life comes to  us moment
by moment One moment disappears  before  the next  comes along: and there is
room for very little in each. That is what  Time  is like. And of course you
and I tend to take it for granted  that this Time series-this arrangement of
past, present and future-is not simply  the way life comes to us but the way
all  things really exist We tend to assume that  the  whole universe and God
Himself are  always moving on from past  to future just as we  do.  But many
learned men do not agree with that. It was the Theologians who first started
the idea that some  things are  not in  Time  at all: later the Philosophers
took it over: and now some of the scientists are doing the same.
     Almost certainly  God  is  not in  Time. His life  does not consist  of
moments following  one another. If  a million  people are praying to  Him at
ten-thirty tonight,  He  need not  listen  to  them  all in that  one little
snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty-and every other moment from the
beginning of  the world-is always the Present for Him. If you like to put it
that  way,  He has all eternity in  which to  listen to the split  second of
prayer put up by a pilot as his plane crashes in flames.
     That is difficult, I know.  Let me try to give something, not the same,
but a bit like it. Suppose I am writing a novel. I write "Mary laid down her
work; next moment came a knock at the door!" For Mary who has to live in the
imaginary  time of my story  there is no  interval between  putting down the
work and hearing the knock. But I, who am  Mary's maker, do not live in that
imaginary time at all. Between writing the first half  of  that sentence and
the  second, I might sit down for three hours and think steadily about Mary.
I could think about Mary as if she were the  only character in the  book and
for as long as I pleased, and the hours I spent in doing so would not appear
in Mary's time (the time inside the story) at all.
     This is not a perfect  illustration, of course. But it may give  just a
glimpse of what I believe  to be  the truth. God is not hurried along in the
Time-stream of this universe any more than an author is hurried along in the
imaginary  time of his own novel He has infinite attention to spare for each
one of  us. He does not have  to deal  with us in the mass.  You are as much
alone  with Him as if you were the  only  being He  had  ever created.  When
Christ died,  He died for you individually just as much  as  if you had been
the only man in the world.
     The way in  which my illustration breaks down is this. In it the author
gets out of one Time-series (that of the novel)  only  by going into another
Time-series  (the  real one).  But  God,  I  believe,  does  not live  in  a
Time-series at all. His life is not dribbled out moment by moment like ours:
with Him it is,  so to speak,  still 1920 and already 1960. For  His life is
Himself.
     If you picture Time as  a straight line along which we  have to travel,
then you must picture God as the whole page on which the  line  is drawn. We
come to the parts  of the line one by one: we have  to leave A behind before
we get to B, and  cannot reach C until we leave B behind. God, from above or
outside or all round, contains the whole line, and sees it all.
     The idea is worth  trying  to grasp because it  removes  some  apparent
difficulties  in  Christianity.  Before  I  became  a  Christian  one of  my
objections was as follows.  The  Christians said that the eternal God who is
everywhere and keeps the whole  universe going,  once became a human  being.
Well  then, said I, how  did the  whole universe keep  going while He was  a
baby, or while He was asleep? How could He at the same time be God who knows
everything  and also a man asking his  disciples "Who  touched me?" You will
notice that  the sting lay in  the time  words: "While  He was a  baby"-"How
could He at the same time?" In other words I was assuming that Christ's life
as God  was in time, and that  His  life as the man Jesus in Palestine was a
shorter period taken out of that  time-just as my service in  the army was a
shorter period  taken  out  of my total life.  And  that is how  most of  us
perhaps tend to think about it.  We picture God living through a period when
His human life was still in  the future: then coming to a period when it was
present: then  going  on  to a period when  He could  look  back  on  it  as
something in the past. But probably these ideas correspond to nothing in the
actual  facts.  You cannot  fit Christ's earthly life  in Palestine into any
time-relations with His life as God beyond all space and time. It is really,
I  suggest,  a timeless  truth about  God that human nature,  and  the human
experience of weakness and sleep and ignorance, are somehow included in  His
whole divine  life.  This  human life  in  God is  from our  point of view a
particular period in  the history of our world (from  the year A.D. one till
the Crucifixion). We therefore imagine it is also a period in the history of
God's  own  existence.  But God  has  no  history. He is too completely  and
utterly real to  have one. For, of  course,  to have a  history means losing
part of your reality (because it had already slipped away into the past) and
not  yet  having another part  (because it is still in the  future): in fact
having nothing but  the tiny  little  present, which has gone before you can
speak about it. God forbid we should think God was  like that.  Even  we may
hope not to be always rationed in that way.
     Another difficulty  we get if we believe God  to  be  in time  is this.
Everyone  who believes in God at all believes that He knows what  you and  I
are  going  to do  tomorrow. But if He knows I am going to do so-and-so, how
can  I be free to do otherwise? Well, here once again,  the difficulty comes
from thinking  that God is progressing along the Time-line like us: the only
difference being  that He can see ahead and we cannot.  Well,  if that  were
true, if God  foresaw our acts,  it would be very hard  to understand how we
could be  free not  to  do  them. But suppose  God is outside and above  the
Time-line. In that case, what we call  "tomorrow" is visible to  Him in just
the same way as what  we call "today."  All the days  are "Now" for Him.  He
does not remember you doing things yesterday; He simply sees you doing them,
because, though you have lost yesterday. He has  not. He does not  "foresee"
you doing  things tomorrow;  He simply sees you doing  them: because, though
tomorrow  is not yet  there for you, it is for Him.  You never supposed that
your actions at this moment were any less  free because God  knows what  you
are  doing.  Well,  He  knows  your  tomorrow's  actions  in just  the  same
way-because He  is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense,
He does not know your action  till you have done it: but then the moment  at
which you have done it is already "Now" for Him.
     This idea  has helped me a good deal. If it does not help you, leave it
alone. It is a "Christian idea" in the sense that great  and wise Christians
have  held it and there is nothing in it contrary to Christianity. But it is
not in the Bible or any of the creeds. You can be a perfectly good Christian
without accepting it, or indeed without thinking of the matter at all

        4. Good Infection


     I  begin this chapter by asking you to  get a  certain picture clear in
your  minds. Imagine  two books lying  on a table  one on  top of the other.
Obviously the bottom  book is  keeping the other one up-supporting it. It is
because of the underneath book that the top one is resting, say,  two inches
from the surface of the table instead of touching the table. Let us call the
underneath  book  A  and the top  one B.  The position  of  A is causing the
position of B. That is clear? Now let us imagine-it could not really happen,
of course, but it will do for an illustration-let us imagine that both books
have  been in that position  for  ever and ever. In  that  case B's position
would  always have  been resulting from A's position.  But all the same, A's
position  would  not have existed  before B's position.  In other  words the
result does not come after the cause. Of course, results usually do: you eat
the  cucumber  first  and have the  indigestion afterwards. But it is not so
with all causes,  and  results. You  will see in  a  moment why I think this
important.
     I said  a few  pages  back  that God  is a  Being  which contains three
Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube contains six squares while
remaining one  body. But as  soon  as I begin  trying  to  explain how these
Persons  are connected I have to use words which make it sound as if  one of
them was there before the  others. The First Person is called the Father and
the Second the Son. We say  that the First begets or produces the second; we
call it begetting, not making, because what He produces is  of the same kind
as  Himself.  In  that way the word Father  is  the only  word to  use.  But
unfortunately  it suggests  that  He  is there first-just as a human  father
exists before  his son. But that is  not so. There  is  no before and  after
about it. And that  is why I have spent some time  trying  to make clear how
one  thing can be the source, or cause, or origin,  of another without being
there before  it. The Son  exists because the Father exists: but there never
was a tune before the Father produced the Son.
     Perhaps the best way  to think of it  is this.  I asked you just now to
imagine those two books, and probably most of you  did. That is, you made an
act of imagination and as a result you had a mental picture. Quite obviously
your act of  imagining was the cause and the mental picture  the result. But
that does not  mean  that  you  first  did  the  imagining and then got  the
picture. The moment you did it, the picture was there. Your will was keeping
the picture before  you all  the time.  Yet that act of will and the picture
began at exactly the same moment and ended at the same moment. If there were
a  Being who had always existed and had always been imagining one thing, his
act would always have been producing a mental picture; but the picture would
be just as eternal as the act.
     In the same way we must think of the Son always, so to speak, streaming
forth from  the  Father, like  light from a lamp, or heat  from a  fire,  or
thoughts  from  a  mind.  He is the  self-expression  of the Father-what the
Father has to say. And there never was a time when He was not saying it. But
have you noticed what is happening? All these  pictures of light or heat are
making it  sound  as if the  Father and Son were  two things  instead of two
Persons. So that after all, the New Testament picture of  a Father and a Son
turns out to be much more accurate than anything we try to substitute for it
That is what always happens when you go away from the words of the Bible. It
is  quite right to go away  from them for  a moment  in  order  to make some
special point clear. But you must always go back. Naturally God knows how to
describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him. He knows that
Father and Son is  more like  the  relation  between  the First  and  Second
Persons than anything else we can think of. Much the most important thing to
know  is that  it is a relation of love. The Father delights in His Son; the
Son looks up to His Father.
     Before going on, notice the practical importance  of this. All sorts of
people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that "God is love," But
they seem  not  to notice that the words "God is love" have  no real meaning
unless God contains at least two Persons. Love  is something that one person
has for another person. If  God was  a single person, then before the  world
was made, He was not love. Of course, what these people mean  when  they say
that God is love is often something quite different: they really  mean "Love
is God."  They really mean that  our feelings of love,  however and wherever
they arise,  and whatever results they produce, are to be treated with great
respect. Perhaps they are: but  that is something quite different from  what
Christians mean  by  the  statement "God is  love."  They  believe that  the
living, dynamic activity of love has been going  on in  God for ever and has
created everything else.
     And that, by the  way, is perhaps the most important difference between
Christianity and  all other  religions:  that  in Christianity God is not  a
static thing-not  even  a  person-but a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life,
almost a kind  of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind
of dance. The union between the Father and Son is such a live concrete thing
that   this  union  itself  is  also  a  Person.  I  know   this  is  almost
inconceivable, but look at it  thus. You know that among human beings,  when
they  get together in a family,  or  a club, or  a trade union,  people talk
about the "spirit" of that family, or club, or trade union. They talk  about
its "spirit"  because  the individual  members, when  they  are together, do
really  develop particular ways of talking and behaving which they would not
have if they were apart. (*)
     ----
     [*] This corporate behaviour may, of course, be either better or  worse
than their individual behaviour.
     ----
     It  is  as  if a sort of  communal personality came into existence.  Of
course, it is not a real  person:  it is only rather like a person. But that
is just one of the  differences between God  and us. What  grows out of  the
joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is  in  fact the Third of
the three Persons who are God.
     This third Person is called, in  technical language, the Holy Ghost  or
the "spirit" of God. Do not be worried or surprised if  you find it (or Him)
rather vaguer or more shadowy in your mind than the other two. I think there
is a  reason why that must be so. In the Christian  life you are not usually
looking at Him: He is always acting through you. If you think  of the Father
as something "out  there,"  in  front of you,  and  of the  Son  as  someone
standing at your side, helping you to pray, trying to turn you  into another
son, then you have to think of the third Person as something  inside you, or
behind you. Perhaps some people might find it easier to begin with the third
Person  and  work  backwards.  God is  love,  and  that  love  works through
men-especially through the whole community of Christians. But this spirit of
love is, from all eternity, a love going on between the Father and Son.
     And now, what does it all matter? It matters more than anything else in
the world. The whole dance, or drama, or pattern of this three-Personal life
is  to be played out in each one of  us: or (putting it the other way round)
each one of us has got to  enter that pattern, take his place in that dance.
There is no other way to  the happiness for which we were made. Good  things
as well  as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to
get warm you must  stand near the fire:  if you want to be  wet you must get
into the water. If you want joy,  power, peace,  eternal life, you must  get
close to, or  even into, the  thing that has  them. They are not  a  sort of
prizes which God could, if He chose, just hand  out to anyone.  They  are  a
great  fountain of energy and  beauty  spurting up at  the  very  centre  of
reality. If you are dose to it, the spray will  wet you: if you are not, you
will remain dry. Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever?
Once a man is separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?
     But  how  is  he to be united  to God? How is it possible  for us to be
taken into the three-Personal life?
     You remember what I said in Chapter II about  begetting  and making. We
are not  begotten by God, we  are only made by Him: in our  natural state we
are  not  sons  of God, only (so to speak)  statues. We have  not got Zoe or
spiritual life: only Bios or biological life which is presently going to run
down and die. Now the whole offer  which Christianity makes is this: that we
can, if we let God have His way, come to share  in the life of Christ. If we
do, we shall  then be  sharing a life  which  was begotten,  not made, which
always has  existed and  always will exist Christ  is the Son of God. If  we
share in this kind of  life we also shall be sons of God.  We shall love the
Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us. He came to this world
and became  a man in order to spread to other men the kind of life He has-by
what I call "good infection." Every Christian is to become a little  Christ.
The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing else.

        5. The Obstinate Toy Soldiers


     The Son of God  became a man to enable men to become sons of God. We do
not  know-anyway,  I  do not know-how things would have worked if the  human
race had  never rebelled against God and joined the enemy. Perhaps every man
would have been "in Christ," would have  shared the life of the Son of  God,
from  the moment he  was born. Perhaps the  Bios or natural  life would have
been  drawn up into the Zoe, the uncreated life, at once and as a matter  of
course. But that is guesswork. You and I  are concerned  with the way things
work now.
     And the present state of things is this. The two kinds of life are  now
not only different  (they would always have been that) but actually opposed.
The  natural life  in each of us is something self-centred,  something  that
wants to be petted and admired, to take advantage of other lives, to exploit
the whole universe. And especially it wants to be  left to  itself: to  keep
well away from anything better or stronger or higher  than it, anything that
might make it feel small. It is afraid of the light and air of the spiritual
world, just as people who have been  brought  up to be dirty are afraid of a
bath. And in a sense it is quite right It knows that  if the  spiritual life
gets hold  of it,  all its  self-centredness  and self-will  are going to be
killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that
     Did you ever think, when you were a child, what fun it would be if your
toys could come to life? Well suppose you  could really have brought them to
life. Imagine turning a tin soldier into a real little man. It would involve
turning the tin  into flesh. And suppose the tin soldier did  not like it He
is not interested  in flesh;  all he sees is that the tin is being spoilt He
thinks you are killing him. He will do everything  he can to prevent you. He
will not be made into a man if he can help it.
     What you would have done about that tin soldier I do not know. But what
God did about us was this.  The Second Person in God, the Son, became  human
Himself: was born into the world as an actual man-a real man of a particular
height, with  hair of a  particular  colour, speaking a particular language,
weighing  so many  stone.  The Eternal Being, who knows  everything  and who
created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before  that) a baby,
and before that a foetus inside a Woman's body.  If you want to get the hang
of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a crab.
     The result of this was that you now had one man who really was what all
men were intended to be: one man in whom the created  life, derived from his
Mother,  allowed  itself to  be  completely  and  perfectly turned into  the
begotten life. The natural human creature in Him was taken up fully into the
divine  Son. Thus in one instance  humanity had,  so to  speak, arrived: had
passed into the life of Christ.  And because the whole  difficulty for us is
that  the natural life has to be, in a sense,  "killed," He chose an earthly
career  which   involved  the   killing  of  His  human  desires   at  every
turn-poverty, misunderstanding  from His own family, betrayal by  one of His
intimate  friends,  being  jeered  at  and  manhandled by  the  Police,  and
execution by torture. And then, after  being thus killed-killed every day in
a sense-the human creature in  Him, because it was united to the divine Son,
came to life again. The Man in  Christ rose again: not only the God. That is
the whole point For the  first time we saw a real man. One tin  soldier-real
tin, just like the rest-had come fully and splendidly alive.
     And  here, of course, we come to the point where  my illustration about
the tin soldier breaks down. In the case of real toy soldiers or statues, if
one  came to life, it would obviously  make  no difference to the rest. They
are  all separate. But human beings  are not. They look separate because you
see diem walking about separately. But then, we are  so made that we can see
only  the present  moment. If we could see the past, then of course it would
look different. For there was a time when every man  was part of his mother,
and (earlier still) part of his  father as well: and when they  were part of
his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in time, as  God sees
it, it  would not look like a lot of separate things dotted about. It  would
look  like  one single growing thing-  rather like a  very complicated tree.
Every individual would appear connected with every other. And not only that.
Individuals are not really separate from God any more than from one another.
Every man, woman, and child  all over the world is  feeling and breathing at
this moment only because God, so to speak, is "keeping him going."
     Consequently, when Christ becomes man it  is not really as if you could
become one particular  tin soldier. It  is as if  something  which is always
affecting  the whole human mass begins, at one point,  to  affect that whole
human  mass in  a  new way. From that  point the effect  spreads through all
mankind. It makes a difference to people who lived before  Christ as well as
to  people who lived after  Him.  It makes  a  difference to people who have
never heard of Him. It  is  like dropping into a glass of water one drop  of
something which gives a new taste or a  new colour to the whole lot. But, of
course, none of these illustrations really  works perfectly. In the long run
God is no one  but Himself and what He does is like nothing else.  You could
hardly expect it to be.
     What,  then, is the  difference  which  He has made to the whole  human
mass? It is just this; that the business of becoming a son of God, of  being
turned from  a created thing into a begotten thing, of passing over from the
temporary biological life into timeless "spiritual" life, has been done  for
us.  Humanity  is  already  "saved" in  principle. We  individuals  have  to
appropriate that salvation. But the  really tough work-the bit we  could not
have  done for  ourselves-has been  done  for us. We have not  got to try to
climb  up into spiritual life  by our own  efforts; it has already come down
into the human race. If we will  only lay  ourselves open to the one  Man in
whom it was fully  present, and  who, in  spite of being God, is also a real
man,  He will  do it in  us and for  us. Remember what  I said  about  "good
infection." One of our own race has this new life: if we get close to Him we
shall catch it from Him.
     Of course, you can express this in all sorts of different ways. You can
say that Christ died for our  sins. You may say that the Father has forgiven
us because Christ has done for us what  we ought to  have done. You may  say
that we are  washed in the blood  of  the Lamb. You may say that  Christ has
defeated death. They  are  all true. If any of them do not  appeal  to  you,
leave it alone and get on with the formula that does. And, whatever you  do,
do not start  quarrelling with other people because  they  use  a  different
formula from yours.

        6. Two Notes


     In order  to avoid  misunderstanding I  here add  notes  on  two points
arising out of the last chapter.
     (1) One sensible critic wrote asking me why, if God wanted sons instead
of "toy soldiers," He did not beget many sons at the outset instead of first
making toy soldiers and  then bringing them to life by such a difficult  and
painful process. One part of the answer to this question is fairly easy: the
other  part is probably beyond all human  knowledge. The easy  part is this.
The process of being turned from a creature into a  son  would not have been
difficult  or  painful if  the  human  race  had  not turned  away  from God
centuries ago. They  were able to do this because He gave them free will: He
gave them free will because  a world of mere  automata could never  love and
therefore never know infinite happiness. The  difficult part  is  this.  All
Christians are  agreed  that there  is, in the full and original sense, only
one "Son  of God."  If we insist on asking "But could there have been many?"
we find ourselves in very deep  water. Have the  words "Could have been" any
sense at  all when  applied to  God? You can say that one  particular finite
thing "could have been" different from  what it  is,  because it  would have
been different if something else had been  different, and the something else
would have been different if some third thing had been different, and so on.
(The letters on this page would have  been red  if the printer  had used red
ink, and  he would have used red ink  if he had been instructed  to, and  so
on.) But  when you  are  talking  about  God-i.e.  about  the  rock  bottom,
irreducible Fact on  which all other facts depend- it is nonsensical  to ask
if  It  could  have been otherwise. It is what It is, and there is an end of
the matter. But quite apart  from  this, I find a  difficulty about the very
idea of  the  Father begetting  many sons from all eternity.  In order to be
many they would have  to be somehow different  from one another. Two pennies
have  the  same shape. How are  they two? By  occupying different places and
containing different atoms.  In other words, to think of them  as different,
we have had  to  bring in space and matter; in fact we have  had to bring in
"Nature"  or the  created universe. I can understand the distinction between
the Father and the Son without bringing in space or matter, because the  one
begets  and the other is begotten.  The  Father's relation to the Son is not
the same as the Son's relation to the Father. But if there were several sons
they would all be related to one another and to the Father in  the same way.
How would they differ from one another? One  does  not notice the difficulty
at first, of course. One thinks one can form the idea of several "sons." But
when  I think closely, I find that the  idea seemed possible only because  I
was vaguely imagining  them as human forms standing  about together  in some
kind of space.  In  other words, though I  pretended  to  be  thinking about
something that exists  before any universe was made,  I was really smuggling
in the picture of a universe  and putting  that something inside  it. When I
stop doing that and still  try to think of  the Father begetting  many  sons
"before all worlds" I find  I am not really  thinking of anything. The  idea
fades away into mere words. (Was Nature-space  and  time and  matter-created
precisely in order to make manyness possible? Is there perhaps no  other way
of  getting many  eternal  spirits  except  by  first  making  many  natural
creatures, in a universe,  and then spiritualising them?  But  of course all
this is guesswork.)
     (2) The idea that  the whole human race is,  in a sense, one thing -one
huge organism,  like  a  tree-must  not  be  confused  with  the  idea  that
individual differences do not matter or that real people,  Tom and Nobby and
Kate, are somehow less important than collective things like classes, races,
and so forth. Indeed the two ideas are opposites. Things  which are parts of
a single organism  may be very different  from one another: things which are
not, may be very alike. Six pennies are  quite  separate and very alike:  my
nose and my lungs  are very different but they are only alive at all because
they are parts of my  body and share its common life. Christianity thinks of
human individuals not as mere members of a group  or items in a list, but as
organs  in  a body-different from one  another and each contributing what no
other  could.  When  you  find  yourself wanting to  turn your children,  or
pupils, or even your neighbours, into people exactly like yourself, remember
that God probably  never meant them to be that.  You  and they are different
organs, intended  to do different things.  On the  other hand, when  you are
tempted not  to bother about someone else's  troubles because  they are  "no
business of yours," remember that though he is different from you he is part
of the same  organism  as you.  If you forget that he  belongs  to  the same
organism as yourself you will become an Individualist. If you forget that he
is a different organ from you, if you want to  suppress differences and make
people all alike, you will  become a Totalitarian. But a Christian must  not
be either a Totalitarian or an Individualist.
     I feel  a  strong desire to  tell you-and I  expect  you  feel a strong
desire to tell me-which of these two  errors is the worse. That is the devil
getting at  us.  He 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.

        7. Let's Pretend


     May I once again start  by putting two pictures, or two stories rather,
into your minds? One is  the story you  have all read called Beauty and  the
Beast. The girl, you remember,  had to marry a  monster for some reason. And
she did. She kissed it as if it were a man. And then, much to her relief, it
really turned into a man and all went well. The other story is about someone
who had to wear a mask; a mask which made him look much nicer than he really
was. He had to wear it for  year.  And  when he took it off he found his own
face had grown to fit it. He was  now really  beautiful.  What had begun  as
disguise had become a reality. I think both these stories may (in a fanciful
way,  of course)  help to illustrate what I have to say in this chapter.  Up
till  now, I have been trying to describe  facts-what God is and what He has
done. Now I want  to talk about practice-what do we do next? What difference
does  all this  theology make? It can start  making a difference tonight. If
you are interested enough to have read thus  far you are probably interested
enough to  make a  shot at saying your prayers: and, whatever  else you say,
you will probably say the Lord's Prayer.
     Its  very  first words are Our Father. Do you now  see what those words
m