Welcome back to another installment of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. My name is Chris Vogel. I'm a writer and a pastor at House of Grace in Hemet, California. And as you know, we've been going through Mere Christianity. We're going to be going through We're about midway through Book 3, which is Christian Behavior, and Book 3, Chapters 6, 7, and 8, if you look at it in its entirety since the beginning of the book, it'll be Chapters 16, 17, and 18. And it seems to me like C.S. Lewis has stopped mentioning the radio broadcasts and little tweaks that he's made as much anymore, and he's just sort of settled in. Not that it's necessarily better, but I think that these things are much more applicable instead of being maybe in the abstract. This really helps people to understand their day-to-day life. And So we're going to be starting in on Chapter 6, which is called Christian Marriage, and you may want to re-listen to the last chapter, which was our Chapter 15, and that was on sexual morality. It might help you to kind of understand where he's going from here. We may not agree with all of the specifics of what C.S. Lewis is saying, but we can understand that he has good intentions towards all of these things, and ultimately these things really do help us to understand the Bible and Jesus' message with really stunning clarity. So let's go ahead and get started. We're going to be starting here, chapter 6 or 16, and this is on Christian marriage. The last chapter was mainly negative. I discussed what was wrong with the sexual impulse in man, but said very little about its right working. In other words, about Christian marriage. There are two reasons why I do not particularly want to deal with marriage. The first is that the Christian doctrines on this subject are extremely unpopular. The second is that I have never been married myself and therefore can speak only at second hand. But in spite of that, I feel I can hardly leave the subject out in an account of Christian morals. The Christian idea of marriage is based on Christ's words that a man and wife are to be regarded as a single organism, for that is what the words one flesh would be in modern English. And the Christians believe that when he said this, he was not expressing a sentiment, but stating a fact. Just as one is stating a fact when one says that a lock and its key are one mechanism, or that a violin and a bow are one musical instrument. The inventor of the human machine was telling us that its two halves, the male and the female, were made to be combined together in pairs, not simply on the sexual level, but totally combined. The monstrosity of sexual intercourse outside marriage is that those who indulge in it are trying to isolate one kind of union, the sexual, from all the other kinds of union which were intended to go along with it and make up the total union. The Christian attitude does not mean that there is anything wrong about sexual pleasure any more than about the pleasure of eating. It means that you must not isolate that pleasure and try to get it by itself any more than you ought to try to get the pleasures of taste without swallowing and digesting by chewing things and spitting them out again. As a consequence, Christianity teaches that marriage is for life. There is, of course, a difference here between different churches. Some do not admit divorce at all. Some allow it reluctantly in very special cases. It is a great pity that Christians should disagree about such a question. But for an ordinary layman, the things to notice is that the churches all agree with one another about marriage a great deal more than any of them agrees with the outside world. I mean, they all regard divorce as something like cutting up a living body, as a kind of surgical operation. Some of them think the operation is so violent that it cannot be done at all. Others admit it as a desperate remedy in extreme cases. They are all agreed that it is more like having both your legs cut off than it is like dissolving a business partnership or even deserting a regiment. What they all disagree with is the modern view that it is a simple readjustment of partners to be made whenever people feel they are no longer in love with one another, or when either of them falls in love with someone else. Before we consider this modern view in its relation to chastity, we must not forget to consider it in relation to another virtue, namely justice. Justice, as I said before, includes the keeping of promises. Now, everyone who has been married in a church has made a public, solemn promise to stick to his or her partner till death. The duty of keeping that promise has no special connection with sexual morality. It is in the same position as any other promise. If, as modern people are always telling us, the sexual impulse is just like all our other impulses, then it ought to be treated like all our other impulses, and as their indulgence is controlled by our promises, so should its be. If, as I think, it is not like all our other impulses, but is morbidly inflamed, then we should be especially careful not to let it lead us into dishonesty. To this, someone may reply that he regarded the promise made in church as a mere formality and never intended to keep it. Whom, then, was he trying to deceive when he made it? God? That was really very unwise. Himself? That was not very much wiser. The bride, or bridegroom, or the in-laws? That was treacherous. More often, I think, the couple, or one of them, hoped to deceive the public. They wanted the respectability that is attached to marriage without intending to pay the price. That is, they were imposters. They cheated. If they are still contented cheats, I have nothing to say to them. Who would argue the high and hard duty of chastity on people who have not yet wished to be merely honest. If they have now come to their senses and want to be honest, their promise, already made, constrains them. And this, you will see, comes under the heading of justice, not that of chastity. If people do not believe in permanent marriage, it is perhaps better that they should live together unmarried than that they should make vows they do not mean to keep. It is true that by living together, without marriage, they will be guilty, in Christian eyes, of fornication. But one fault is not mended by adding another. Unchastity is not improved by adding perjury. The idea that being in love is the only reason for remaining married really leaves no room for marriage as a contract or promise at all. If love is the whole thing, then the promise can add nothing, and if it adds nothing, then it should not be made. The curious thing is that lovers themselves, while they remain really in love, know this better than those who talk about love. As Chesterton pointed out, those who are in love have a natural inclination to bind themselves by promises. Love songs all over the world are full of vows of eternal constancy. The Christian law is not forcing upon the passion of love something which is foreign to that passion's own nature. It is demanding that lovers should take seriously something which their passion of itself impels them to do. And of course, the promise made when I am in love and because I am in love, to be true to the beloved as long as I live, commits me to being true even if I cease to be in love. A promise must be about things that I can do, about actions. No one can promise to go on feeling in a certain way. He might as well promise never to have a headache or always to feel hungry. But what, it may be asked, is the use of keeping two people together if they are no longer in love? There are several sound social reasons. To provide a home for their children, to protect the woman who has probably sacrificed or damaged her own career by getting married, from being dropped whenever the man is tired of her. But there is also another reason, of which I am very sure, though I find it a little hard to explain. It is hard because so many people cannot be brought to realize that when B is better than C, A may be even better than B. They like thinking in terms of good and bad, not of good, better, and best, or bad, worse, and worst. They want to know whether you think patriotism a good thing. If you reply that it is, of course, far better than individual selfishness, but that it is inferior to universal charity and should always give way to universal charity when the two conflict, they think you are being evasive. They ask what you think of dueling. If you reply that it is far better to forgive a man than to fight a duel with him, but that even a duel might be better than a lifelong enmity which expresses itself in secret efforts to do the man down, they go away complaining that you would not give them a straight answer. I hope no one will make this mistake about what I am now going to say. What we call being in love is a glorious state, and in several ways, good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous. It opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved, but to all beauty and its subordinates, especially at first. our merely animal sexuality, in that sense, love is the great conqueror of lust. No one in his senses would deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or cold self-centeredness. But, as I said before, the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs. Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it. but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now, no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last, but feelings come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called being in love usually does not last. If the old fairy tale ending, they lived happily ever after, is taken to mean They felt for the next 50 years exactly as they felt the day before they were married, then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true. and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But of course, ceasing to be in love need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense, love as distinct from being in love, is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit, reinforced by, in Christian marriages, the grace which both partners ask and receive from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other, as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be in love with someone else. Being in love first moved them to promise fidelity. This quieter love enables them to keep that promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run. Being in love was the explosion that started it. If you disagree with me, of course you will say, he knows nothing about it. He's not married. You may quite possibly be right. But before you say that, make quite sure that you are judging me by what you really know from your own experience and from watching the lives of your friends, and not by ideas you have derived from novels and films. This is not so easy to do as people think. Our experience is colored through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves. People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person, you may expect to go on being in love forever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change, not realizing that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last. The sort of a thrill a boy has at The first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the RAF, which is the Royal Air Force, and is really learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some delightful place dies away when you really go to live there. Does this mean it would be better not to learn to fly and not to live in the beautiful place? By no means. In both cases, if you go through with it, the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest. What is more, and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this. It is just the people who are ready to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to the sober interest, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction. The man who has learned to fly and become a good pilot will suddenly discover music. The man who has settled down to live in the beauty spot will discover gardening. This is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies. It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill. That is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go. Let it die away. Go on through that period of death into the quieter interests and happiness that follow, and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life. It is because so few people understand this that you find many middle-aged men and women mondering about their lost youth at the very age when new horizons ought to be appearing and new doors opening all around them. It is much better fun to learn to swim than to go on endlessly and hopelessly tying, trying to get back the feeling you had when you first went paddling as a small boy. Another notion we get from novels and plays is that falling in love is something quite irresistible, something that just happens to one, like measles. And because they believe this, some married people throw up the sponge and give in when they find themselves attracted by a new acquaintance. But I am inclined to think that these irresistible passions are much rarer in real life than in books. At any rate, when one is grown up, when we meet someone beautiful and clever, sympathetic, of course we ought, in one sense, to admire and love these good qualities. but it is not very largely in our own choice whether this love shall or shall not turn into what we call being in love. No doubt, if our minds are full of novels and plays and sentimental songs and our bodies full of alcohol, we shall turn any love we feel into that kind of love, just as if we have put a rut in your path, all the rain rainwater will run into that rut. And if you wear blue spectacles, everything you see will turn blue. But that will be our own fault. Before leaving the question of divorce, I should like to distinguish two things which are often confused, which are often very confused. The Christian conception of marriage is one. The other is the quite different question How far Christians, if they are voters or members of parliament, ought to try to force their views of marriage on the rest of the community. by embodying them in the divorce laws. A great many people seem to think that if you are a Christian yourself, you should try to make divorce difficult for everyone. I do not think that. At least I know I should be very angry if the Mohammedans tried to prevent the rest of us from drinking wine. My own view is that the churches should frankly recognize that the majority of the British people are not Christians, and therefore cannot be expected to live Christian lives. There ought to be two distinct kinds of marriage, one governed by the state with rules enforced on all citizens, the other governed by the church with rules enforced by her or her own members. The distinction ought to be quite sharp, so that a man knows which couples are married in a Christian sense and which are not. So much for the Christian doctrine about the permanence of marriage. Something else, even more unpopular, remains to be dealt with. Christian wives promise to obey their husbands. In Christian marriage, the man is said to be the head. Two questions obviously arise here. One, Why should there be a head at all? Why not equality? Two, why should it be the man? Number one, the need for some head follows from the idea that marriage is permanent. Of course, as long as the husband and wife are agreed, no question of a head need arise. And we may hope that this will be the normal state of affairs in a Christian marriage. But when there is a real disagreement, what is to happen? Talk it over, of course, but I am assuming they have done that and still failed to reach agreement. What do they do next? They cannot decide by a majority vote, for in a council of two, there can be no majority. Surely only one or other of two things can happen. Either they must separate and go their own ways, or else one or other of them must have a casting vote. If marriage is permanent, one or other party must, in the last resort, have the power of deciding the family policy. You cannot have a permanent association without a constitution. Number two, if there must be a head, why the man? Well, firstly, is there any very serious wish that it should be the woman? As I have said, I am not married myself, but as far as I can see, even a woman who wants to be the head of her own house does not usually admire the same state of things when she finds it going on next door. She is much more likely to say, poor Mr. X, why he allows that appalling woman to boss him about the way that she does is more than I can imagine. I do not think she is even very flattered if anyone mentions the fact of her own headship. There must be something unnatural about the rule of wives over husbands, because the wives themselves are half ashamed of it and despise the husbands whom they rule. But there is also another reason, and here I speak quite frankly as a bachelor, because it is a reason you can see from outside even better than from inside. The relations of the family to the outer world, what might be called its foreign policy, must depend, in the last resort, upon the man, because he always ought to be, and usually is, much more just to the outsiders. A woman is primarily fighting for her own children and husband against the rest of the world. Naturally, almost in a sense rightly, their claims override. for her all other claims. This is the special trustee of their interests. The function of the husband is to see that this natural preference of hers is not given its head. He has the last word in order to protect other people from the intense family patriotism of the wife. If anyone doubts this, let me ask a simple question. If your dog has bitten the child next door, or if your child has hurt the dog next door, Which would you rather, excuse me, which would you sooner have to deal with, the master of that house or the mistress? Or if you are a married woman, let me ask you this question. Much as you admire your husband, would you not say that his chief failing is his tendency not to stick up for his rights and yours against the neighbors as vigorously as you would like? A bit of an appeaser? And that's how chapter 16 ends. And I'll note that C.S. Lewis ends the chapter with his question a bit of an appeaser with a capital letter. A, and I'm not entirely sure what he means by that. Sometimes he does that and there are some other points in in the next two chapters. I'm not a hundred percent sure. It's possible that he may be referencing Jesus in this in terms of like the the headship of the church, but I'm not a hundred percent sure. Just thought I would note that there is a capital A there. All right. We'll go ahead and start in on chapter 7, which is titled, Forgiveness. I said in a previous chapter that chastity was the most unpopular of the Christian virtues, but I am not sure I was right. I believe there is one even more unpopular. it is laid down in the Christian rule, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself. Because in Christian morals, thy neighbor includes thy enemy. And so we come up against this terrible duty of forgiving our enemies. Everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until they have something to forgive, as we had during the war. And then, to mention the subject at all, is to be greeted with howls of anger. It is not that people think this too high and difficult a virtue, it is that they think it hateful and contemptible. That sort of talk makes them sick, they say, and half of you already want to ask me, I wonder how you'd feel about forgiving the Gestapo if you were a Pole or a Jew. So do I. I wonder very much, just as when Christianity tells me that I must not deny my religion even to save myself from death by torture. I wonder very much what I should do when it came to that point. I am not trying to tell you in this book what I could do. I can do precious little. I am telling you what Christianity is. I did not invent it. And there, Right in the middle of it, I find, forgive us our sins as we forgive those that sin against us. There is no slightest suggestion that we are offered forgiveness on any other terms. It is made perfectly clear that if we do not forgive, we shall not be forgiven. There are no two ways about it. What are we to do? It is going to be hard enough anyway, but I think there are two things we can do to make it easier. When you start mathematics, you do not begin with the calculus. You begin with simple addition. In the same way, if we really want, but all depends on really wanting, To learn how to forgive, perhaps we had better start with something easier than the Gestapo. One might start with forgiving one's husband or wife, or parents or children, or the nearest NCO, and I believe that that means non-commissioned officer, for something they have said or done in the last week. That will probably keep us busy for the moment. And secondly, we might try to understand exactly what loving your neighbor as yourself means. I have to love him as I love myself. Well, how exactly do I love myself? Now that I come to think of it, I have not exactly got a feeling of fondness or affection for myself, and I do not even always enjoy my own society. So apparently, love your neighbor does not mean feel fond of him or find him attractive. I ought to have seen that before, because, of course, you cannot feel fond of a person by trying. Do I think well of myself? Think myself a nice chap? Well, I am afraid I sometimes do, and those are, no doubt, my worst moments. But that is not why I love myself. In fact, it is the other way around. My self-love makes me think myself nice, but thinking myself nice is not why I love myself. So loving my enemy does not apparently mean thinking them nice either. That is an enormous relief. For a good many people, imagine that forgiving your enemies means making out that they are really not so bad fellows after all, when it is quite plain that they are. Go a step further. In my most clear-sighted moments, not only do I not think myself a nice man, but I know that I am very nasty. I can look at some of the things I have done with horror and loathing. So apparently, I am allowed to loathe and hate some of the things my enemies do. Now that I come to think of it, I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man's actions, but not hate the bad man, or, as they would say, hate the sin, but not the sinner. For a long time I used to think This is a silly, straw-splitting distinction. How could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later, it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life, namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it. In fact, the very reason why I hated the things was that I loved the man. Just because I loved myself, I was sorry to find that I was the sort of man who did those things. Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves. Being sorry that the man should have done such things and hoping if it is any way possible that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again. The real test is this. Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that? Or is it a feeling of disappointment and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies as bad as possible? If it is the second, then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black, was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see gray as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally, we shall insist on seeing everything, God and our friends and ourselves included, as bad. And not be able to stop doing it, we shall be fixed forever in a universe of pure hatred. Now a step further, does loving your enemy mean not punishing him? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment, even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and be hanged. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a man to death or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy. I always have thought so, ever since I became a Christian and long before the war, and I still think so now that we are at peace. It is no good quoting, thou shalt not kill. There are two Greek words, the ordinary word to kill and the word to murder. And when Christ quotes that commandment, he uses the murder one in all three accounts, Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And I am told there is the same distinction in Hebrew. All killing is not murder, any more than all sexual intercourse is adultery. When soldiers came to St. John the Baptist asking what to do, he never remotely suggested that they ought to leave the army, nor did Christ when he met a Roman sergeant major, what they called a centurion. The idea of the knight, the Christian in arms for the defense of a good cause, is one of the great Christian ideas. War is a dreadful thing, and I can respect an honest pacifist, though I think he is entirely mistaken. What I cannot understand is this sort of semi-pacifism. you get nowadays, which gives people the idea that though you have to fight, you ought to do it with a long face and as if you're ashamed of it. It is that feeling that robs lots of magnificent young Christians in the service of something they have a right to, something which is the natural accompaniment of courage, a kind of gaiety and wholeheartedness. I have often thought to myself how it would be, how it would have been if when I had served in the First World War, I had some young German I and some young German had killed each other simultaneously and found ourselves together a moment after death. I cannot imagine that either of us would have felt any resentment or even any embarrassment. I think we might have laughed over it. I imagine somebody will say, well, if one is allowed to condemn the enemy's acts and punish him and kill him, what difference is left between Christian morality and the ordinary view? All the difference in the world. Remember, we Christians think man lives forever. Therefore, what really matters is those little marks or twists on the central, inside part of the soul, which are going to turn it, in the long run, into a heavenly or a hellish creature. We may kill if necessary, but we must not hate and enjoy hating. We may punish if necessary, but we must not enjoy it. In other words, something inside us, the feeling of resentment, the feeling that wants to get one's own back, must be simply killed. I do not mean that anyone can decide this moment that he will never feel it anymore. That is not how things happen. I mean that every time it bobs its head up, day after day, Year after year, all our lives long, we must hit it on the head. It is hard work, but the attempt is not impossible. Even while we kill and punish, we must try to feel about the enemy as we feel about ourselves. To wish that he were not bad, to hope that he may, in this world or another, be cured. In fact, to wish his good. That is what is meant in the Bible by loving him, wishing his good, not feeling fond of him, nor saying he is nice when he is not. I admit that this means loving people who have nothing lovable about them. But then, has oneself anything lovable about it? You love it simply because it is yourself. God intends us to love all selves in the same way and for the same reason, but he has given us the sum ready worked out in our own case to show us how it works. We have then to go on and apply the rule to all the other selves. Perhaps it makes it easier if we remember that That is how he loves us. Not for any nice, attractive qualities we think we have, but just because we are the things called selves. For really, there is nothing else in us to love. Creatures like us who actually find hatred such a pleasure, that to give it up is like giving up beer or tobacco. And that ends chapter 17. He ended chapter 17 with ellipses, so it seems to me like he would like us to go straight into chapter 18, which is called The Great Sin. And it's interesting because it takes him a while to tell us what it is, and I'm not going to rob you of the anticipation to find out. So let's go ahead and get started on chapter 18, The Great Sin. I now come to that part of Christian morals where they differ most sharply from all other morals. There is one vice of which no man in the world is free, which everyone 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 center of Christian morals did not lie there. Well, now we have come to the center. 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 patronize me, or show off? The point is that each person's pride is in competition with everyone 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 everyone 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 that 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 better, 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 that makes a man with 10,000 pounds a year anxious to get 20,000 pounds a year? It is not the greed for more pleasure. 10,000 pounds will give all the luxuries that any man can really enjoy. It is pride. The wish to be richer than some other man. And, still more, the wish for power. For, of course, power is what pride really enjoys. There's 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 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 penny worth 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 center 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 become chaste and brave and self-controlled, provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the dictatorship of pride, just as he would be quite content to see your chillblains cured. And chillblains are skin sores that are due to exposure to cold temperature. So I'm going to reread that sentence because it's crucial. It's a long one, let me back up. He is perfectly, this is the devil, he is perfectly content to see you become chaste and brave and self-controlled, provided all the time. He is setting up in you the dictatorship of pride, just as he would be quite content to see your chillblains 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. One, 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. And 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. Number two, 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 warmhearted 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's 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. Number four. 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 realize 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. And that ends chapter 18 That ends our three chapters for today. I wanted to give you one suggestion. There is a channel on YouTube called C.S. Lewis Doodle, and they draw selected essays to make them easier to understand, and I highly recommend them. Fair amount of mere Christianity on there. They're really, really good illustrations to be able to help you understand these things. So I just wanted to pass that along to you to help you enjoy it. And every chapter is so good in mere Christianity, but These three today are just, they just really hit home for me and I hope that they hit home for you so that we can try and approach humility and doing the right thing in all of these different ways. So I'll go ahead and close this down for today and I'll start prepping for the next one. Have a good day and God bless you.