Hi everyone, this is Chris Vogel, assistant pastor at House of Grace Christian Fellowship in Hemet, California. I'm also a writer and I'm pretty excited about Mere Christianity. So I've been going through and reading from it. We're in the beginning stages of COVID-19. So some of my previous ones have been Bible studies and we've had scripture in them. But now I'm just trying to kind of read through all of the chapters and get these posted as often as I can. So without further ado, we're going to go ahead and do our equivalent of chapters 10, 11, and 12. And that will be the final chapter, chapter 5, right now of book 2. And then we'll move into book 3. And book 3 is called Christian Behavior. And we'll do two chapters in that. So we're going to go ahead and start in on our chapter 10. And it's called The Practical Conclusion. The perfect surrender and humiliation were undergone by Christ, perfect because He was God, surrender and humiliation because He was a man. Now, the Christian belief is that if we somehow share the humility and suffering of Christ, we shall also share in His conquest of death and find a new life after we have died in it, become perfect and perfectly happy creatures. This means something much more than our trying to follow His teaching. People often ask when the next step in evolution, the step to something beyond man, will happen, but in the Christian view, it has happened already. In Christ, a new kind of man appeared, and the new kind of life which began in Him is to be put into us. How is this to be done? Now, please remember, how we acquired the old, ordinary kind of life. We derived it from others, from our father and mother and all our ancestors, without our consent, and by a very curious process involving pleasure, pain, and danger, a process you would never have guessed. Most of us spend a good many years in childhood trying to guess it, and some children, when they are first told, do not believe it, and I am not sure that I blame them, for it is very odd." And just as a side note, he's talking about sex. Now, the God who arranged that process is the same God who arranges how the new kind of life, the Christ life, is to be spread. We must be prepared for it, being awed, too. He did not consult us when he invented sex. He has not consulted us either when he invented this. there are three things that spread the Christ life to us. Baptism, belief, and the mysterious action which different Christians call by different names. Holy Communion, the Mass, the Lord's Supper. So that's the third one. Holy Communion, another word for it would be the Mass or the Lord's Supper. At least those are the three ordinary methods. I'm not saying there may not be special cases where it is spread without one or more of these. I have not time to go into special cases, and I do not know enough. If you are trying in a few minutes to tell a man how to get to Edinburgh, you will tell him the trains he can use, it is true, getting there by boat or by plane. but you will hardly bring that in, and I am not saying anything about which of these three things is the most essential. My Methodist friend would like me to say more about belief and less, in proportion, about the other two, but I'm not going to do that. Anyone who professes to teach you Christian doctrine will, in fact, tell you to use all three, and that is enough for our present purpose. I cannot myself see why these things should be the conductors of the new kind of life, but then, if one did not happen to know, I should never have seen any connection between a particular physical pleasure and the appearance of a new human being in the world. we have to take reality as it comes to us. There is no good jabbering about what it ought to be like or what we should have expected it to be like. But though I cannot see why it should be so, I can tell you why I believe it is so. I have explained why I have to believe that Jesus was, and is, God. And it seems plain as a matter of history that he taught his followers that the new life was communicated in this way. In other words, I believe it on his authority. Do not be scared by the word authority. Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. 99% of the things you believe are believed on authority. I believe there is such a place as New York. I have not seen it myself. I could not prove by abstract reasoning that there must be such a place. I believe it because reliable people have told me so. The ordinary man believes in the solar system, atoms, evolution, and the circulation of the blood on authority, because the scientists say so. Every historical statement in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada. None of us could prove them by pure logic as you prove a thing in mathematics. We believe them simply because people who did see them have left writings that tell us about them, in fact, on authority. A man who gibbed at authority in other things, as some people do in religion, would have to be content to know nothing all his life. Do not think I am setting up baptism and belief in the Holy Communion as things that will do instead of your own attempts to copy Christ. Your natural life is derived from your parents. That does not mean it will stay there if you do nothing about it. You can lose it by neglect, or you can drive it away by committing suicide. You have to feed it and look after it, but always remember you are not making it, you are only keeping up a life you got from someone else. In the same way, a Christian can lose the Christ life, which has been put into him, and he has to make efforts to keep it. But even the best Christian that ever lived is not acting on his own steam. He is only nourishing or protecting a life he could never have acquired by his own efforts. And that has practical consequences. As long as the natural life is in your body, it will do a lot towards repairing that body. Cut it, and up to a point, it will heal, as a dead body would not. A live body is not one that never gets hurt, but one that can, to some extent, repair itself. In the same way, a Christian is not a man who never goes wrong, but a man who is enabled to repent and pick himself up and begin over again after each stumble, because the Christ life is inside him, repairing him all the time, enabling him to repeat, in some degree, the kind of voluntary death which Christ himself carried out. That is why the Christian is in a different position from other people who are trying to be good. They hope, by being good, to please God, if there is one, or, if they think there is not, at least they hope to deserve approval from good men. but the Christian thinks any good he does comes from the Christ life inside him. He does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because he loves us. Just as the roof of a greenhouse does not attract the sun because it is bright, but becomes bright because the sun shines on it. And let me make it quite clear that when Christians say the Christ life is in them, they do not mean simply something mental or moral. When they speak of being in Christ or of Christ being in them, this is not simply a way of saying that they are thinking about Christ or copying him. They mean that Christ is actually operating through them, that the whole mass of Christians are the physical organism through which Christ acts, that we are His fingers and muscles, the cells of His body, and perhaps that explains one or two things. It explains why this new life is spread, not only by purely mental acts like belief, but by bodily acts like baptism and Holy Communion. It is not merely the spreading of an idea. It is more like evolution, a biological or super biological fact. There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God can never God never meant man to be a purely spiritual creature. That is why he uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not. He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it. Here's another thing that puzzles, that used to puzzle me. It is not frightfully unfair that this new life should be confined to people who have heard of Christ and been able to believe in Him. But the truth is, God has not told us what His arrangements about the other people are. We do not know Sorry. We do know that no man can be saved except through Christ. We do not know that only those who know Him can be saved through Him. But in the meantime, if you are worried about the people outside, the most unreasonable thing you can do is to remain outside yourself. Christians are Christ's body, the organism through which he works. Every addition to that body enables him to do more. If you want to help those outside, you must add your own little cell to the body of Christ, who alone can help them. Cutting off a man's fingers would be an odd way of getting him to do more work. Another possible objection is this. Why is God landing in this enemy-occupied world in disguise and starting a sort of secret society to undermine the devil? Why is he not landing in force, invading it? Is it that he is not strong enough? Well, Christians think he is going to land in force. We do not know when. But we can guess why he is delaying. He wants to give us the chance of joining his side freely. I do not suppose you and I would have thought much of a Frenchman who waited till the Allies were marching into Germany and then announced he was on our side. God will invade, but I wonder whether people who ask God to interfere openly and directly in our world quite realize what it will be like when he does. When that happens, it is the end of the world. When the author walks onto the stage, the play is over. God is going to invade, alright, but what is the good of saying you are on his side then, when you see the whole natural universe melting away like a dream, and something else, something it never entered your head to conceive, comes crashing in. Something so beautiful, to some of us and so terrible to others, that none of us will have any choice left. For this time it will be God without disguise, something so overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it is impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing. It will be the time when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realized it before or not. Now, today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that chance. It will not last forever. We must take it or leave it. And that ends chapter 10 and book two. And so we're going to continue on with book three. It's called Christian Behavior. Here's chapter one of book three, or our chapter 11, and it is called The Three Parts of Morality. There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that, as far as he could make out, God was the sort of person who is always snooping around to see if anyone is enjoying himself, and then trying to stop it. And I am afraid that is the sort of idea that the word morality raises in a good many people's minds. Something that interferes, something that stops you having a good time. In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown or a strain or a friction in the running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with our natural inclinations. When you are being taught how to use any machine, the instructor keeps on saying, no, don't do it like that. Because of course, there are all sorts of things that look all right and seem to you the natural way of treating the machine, but do not really work. Some people prefer to talk about moral ideals rather than moral rules and about moral idealism rather than moral obedience. Now it is, of course, quite true that moral perfection is an ideal in the sense that we cannot achieve it. In that sense, every kind of perfection is for us humans, an ideal. We cannot succeed in being perfect car drivers or perfect tennis players or in drawing perfectly straight lines, but there is another sense in which it is very misleading to call moral perfection an ideal. When a man says that a certain woman or house or ship or garden is his ideal, He does not mean, unless he is rather a fool, that everyone else ought to have the same ideal. In such matters we are entitled to have different tastes and therefore different ideals, but it is dangerous to describe a man who tries very hard to keep the moral law as a man of high ideals, because this might lead you to think that moral perfection was a private taste of his own, and that the rest of us were not called on to share it. This would be a disastrous mistake. Perfect behavior may be as unattainable as perfect gear-changing when we drive, but it is a necessary ideal. prescribed for all men by the very nature of the human machine, just as perfect gear changing is an ideal prescribed for all drivers by the very nature of cars. And it would be even more dangerous to think of oneself as a person of high ideals because one is trying to tell no lies at all, instead of only a few lies, or never to commit adultery, instead of committing it only seldom. or not to be a bully instead of being only a moderate bully. It might lead you to become a prig and to think you were rather a special person who deserved to be congratulated on his idealism. In reality, you might just as well expect to be congratulated because whenever you do a sum, you try to get it quite right. To be sure, perfect arithmetic is an ideal. You will certainly make some mistakes in some calculations, but there is nothing very fine about trying to be quite accurate at each step and each sum. It would be idiotic not to try, for every mistake is going to cause you trouble later on. In the same way, every moral failure is going to cause trouble, probably to others and certainly to yourself. By talking about rules and obedience instead of ideals and idealism, we help to remind ourselves of these facts. Now, Let us go a step further. There are two ways in which the human machine goes wrong. One is when human individuals drift apart from one another or else collide with one another and do one another damage by cheating or bullying. The other is when things go wrong inside the individual, when the different parts of him, his different faculties and desires and so on, either drift apart or interfere with one another. You can get the idea plain if you think of us as a fleet of ships sailing in formation. The voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the ships do not collide and get in one another's way, and secondly, if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines in good order. As a matter of fact, you cannot have either of these two things without the other. If the ships keep on having collisions, they will not remain seaworthy very long. On the other hand, if their steering gears are out of order, they will not be able to avoid collision. Or, if you like, think of humanity as a band playing a tune. To get a good result, you need two things. Each player's individual instrument must be in tune, and also each must come in at the right moment so as to combine with all the others. But there is one thing we have not yet taken into account. We do not, excuse me, we have not asked where the fleet is trying to get to, or what piece of music the band is trying to play. The instruments might be all in tune and might all come in at the right moment, but even so the performance would not be a success if they had been engaged to provide dance music and actually played nothing but dead marches. And however well the fleet sailed, its voyage would be a failure if it were meant to reach New York and actually arrived at Calcutta. Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonizing the things inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole, what man was made for, what course the whole fleet ought to be on, what tune the conductor of the band wants it to play. You may have noticed that modern people are nearly always thinking about the first thing and forgetting the other two. When people say in the newspapers that we are striving for Christian moral standards, they usually mean that we are striving for kindness and fair play between nations and classes and individuals. That is, they are thinking only of the first thing. And by the way, the first thing, again, was fair play and harmony between individuals. When a man says about something he wants to do, it can't be wrong because it doesn't do anything else any harm, he is thinking only of the first thing. He is thinking it does not matter what his ship is like inside, provided that he does not run into the next ship. And it is quite natural, when we start thinking about morality, to begin with the first thing, with social relations. For one thing, the result of bad morality in that sphere are so obvious and press on us every day, war and poverty and graft and lies and shoddy work. And also, as long as you stick to the first thing, there is very little disagreement about morality. Almost all people at all times have agreed, in theory, that human beings ought to be honest and kind and helpful to one another. But though it is natural to begin with all that, if our thinking about morality stops there, we might just as well not have thought at all. Unless we go on to the second thing. the tidying up inside each human being, we are only deceiving ourselves. What is the good of telling the ships how to steer so as to avoid collisions if, in fact, they are such crazy old tubs that cannot be steered at all? What is the good of drawing up on paper rules for social behavior if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill-temper, and self-conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them? I do not mean for a moment that we ought not to think, and think hard, about improvements in our social and economic system. What I do mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realize that nothing but the courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. It is easy enough to remove the particular kind of graft or bullying that go on under the present system, but as long as men are twisters or bullies, they will find some way of carrying on the old game under the new system. You cannot make men good by law, and without good men, you cannot have a good society. That is why we must go on to think of the second thing, of morality inside the individual. But I do not think we can stop there either. We are now getting to the point at which different beliefs about the universe lead to different behavior, and it would seem, at first sight, very sensible to stop before we got there and just carry on with those parts of morality that all sensible people agree about. But can we? Remember that religion involves a series of statements about facts, which must either be true or false. If they are true, one set of conclusions will follow about the right sailing of the human fleet. If they are false, quite a different set. For example, let us go back to the man who says that a thing cannot be wrong unless it hurts some other human being. He quite understands that he must not damage the other ships in the convoy, but he honestly thinks that what he does to his own ship is simply his own business. But does it not make a great difference whether his ship is his own property or not? Does it not make a great difference whether I am, so to speak, the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant? responsible to the real landlord. If somebody else made me for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself. Again, Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever, and this must be either true or false. Now, there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only 70 years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live forever. Perhaps my bad temper or my jealousy are gradually getting worse. so gradually that the increase in 70 years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years. In fact, if Christianity is true, hell is precisely the correct technical term for what it would be. And immortality makes this other difference, which, by the by, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism, and democracy. If individuals live only 70 years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important, but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization compared with his is only a moment. It seems then, if we are to think about morality, we must think of all three departments, relation between man and man, things inside each man, and relations between man and the power that made him. We can all cooperate in the first one. Disagreements begin with the second, and become more serious with the third. It is dealing with the third that the main differences between Christian and non-Christian morality come out. For the rest of this book, I am going to assume the Christian point of view, and look at the whole picture as it will be if Christianity is true. All right, that ends that chapter. We're gonna be moving on to our last one. I hope that you caught that C.S. Lewis is kind of clearly dividing here at this point, at the end of the first chapter of book three, that from here on out, he's going to assume the Christian point of view. and look at the entirety of what he's going to be talking about with the assumption that Christianity is true. All right, so our chapter 12 is about to start. This is chapter two of book three, and it is called The Cardinal Virtues. The previous section was originally composed to be given as a short talk on the air. If you are allowed to talk for only 10 minutes, pretty well everything else has to be sacrificed to brevity. One of my chief reasons for dividing morality up into three parts with my picture of the ships sailing in convoy was that this seemed the shortest way of covering the ground. Here I want to give some idea of another way in which the subject has been divided by old writers, which was too long to use in my talk, but which is a very good one. According to this longer scheme, there are seven virtues. Four of them are called cardinal virtues, and the remaining three are called theological virtues. The cardinal ones are those which all civilized people recognize. The theological are those which, as a rule, only Christians know about. I shall deal with the theological ones later on. At present, I am talking about the four cardinal virtues. The word cardinal has nothing to do with cardinals in the Roman church. It comes from a Latin word meaning the hinge of a door. These were called cardinal virtues because they are, as we should say, pivotal. They are prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude. And now C.S. Lewis is going to go on to talk about them. He spends a significant amount of time on prudence, a fair amount of time on temperance, and then he kind of just really briefly goes into justice, and then the fourth one, fortitude, is semi-brief. So let's go ahead. He's going to talk about prudence, temperance, justice, and fortitude. Prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it. Nowadays, most people hardly think of prudence as one of the virtues. In fact, because Christ said he could only get into his world Excuse me. In fact, because Christ said we could only get into his world by being like children, many Christians have the idea that, provided you are good, it does not matter being a fool. But that is a misunderstanding. In the first place, most children show plenty of prudence about doing the things they are really interested in, and think them out quite sensibly. In the second place, as St. Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence. On the contrary, he told us to be not only as harmless as doves, but also as wise as serpents. He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded, affectionate, and teachable, as good children are. But he also wants every bit of intelligence we have to be alert, at its job, and in first-class fighting trim. The fact that you are giving money to a charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. The fact that what you are thinking about is God himself, for example, when you're praying, does not mean that you can be content with the same babyish ideas which you had when you were a five-year-old. It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any less or have less use for you if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain. He has room for people with very little sense, but he wants everyone to use what sense they have. The proper motto is not, be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever, but be good, sweet maid, and don't forget that this involves being as clever as you can. God is no fonder of intellectual slackers than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you, you are embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. But fortunately, It works the other way around. Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his intelligence being sharpened. One of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world. All right. Now we come to number two, temperance. Temperance is, unfortunately, one of those words that has changed its meaning. It now usually means teetotalism, but in the days when the second cardinal virtue was christened temperance, it meant nothing of the sort. Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all pleasures, and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. It is a mistake to think that Christians ought all to be teetotalers. Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the teetotal religion. Of course, it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any Christian at a particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot drink at all without drinking too much, or because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness, and must not encourage them by drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying. One of the marks of a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting everyone else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all sorts of things for special reasons. Marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema. But the moment he starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do use them, he has taken the wrong turning. One great piece of mischief has been done by the modern restriction of the word temperance to the question of drink. It helps people to forget that you can be just as intemperate about lots of other things. A man who makes his golf or his motor bicycle the center of his life or a woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog is being just as intemperate as someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily. Bridge mania or golf mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road, but God is not deceived by externals. All right, number three, justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on in law courts. It is the old name for everything we should now call fairness. It includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises, and all that side of life. All right, here's number four. And fortitude includes both kinds of courage, the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that sticks it under pain. guts is perhaps the nearest modern English. You will notice, of course, that you cannot practice any of the other virtues very long without bringing this one into play. There is one further point about the virtues that ought to be noticed. There is a difference between doing some particular just or temperate action and being a just or temperate man. Someone who is not a good tennis player may now and then make a good shot. What you mean by a good player is a man whose eye and muscles and nerves have been so trained by making innumerable good shots that they can now be relied on. They have a certain tone or quality which is there even when he is not playing. Just as a mathematician's mind has a certain habit and outlook which is there even when he is not doing mathematics. In the same way, a man who perseveres in doing just actions gets in the end a certain quality of character. Now it is that quality rather than the particular action which we mean when we talk of a virtue. This distinction is important for the following reason. If we thought only of the particular actions, we might encourage three wrong ideas. We might think that, provided you did the right thing, it did not matter how or why you did it, whether you did it willingly or unwillingly, sulkily or cheerfully. through fear of public opinion or for its own sake. But the truth is that right actions done for the wrong reason do not help to build the internal quality or character called a virtue, and it is this quality or character that really matters. If the bad tennis player hits very hard, not because he sees that a very hard stroke is required, but because he has lost his temper, his stroke might possibly by luck, help him to win that particular game, but it will not be helping him to become a reliable player. 2. We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules, whereas he really wants people of a particular sort. And number three, we might think that the virtues were necessary only for this present life, that in the other world, we could stop being just because there is nothing to quarrel about and stop being brave because there is no danger. Now, it is quite true that there will probably be no occasion for just or courageous acts in the next world, but there will be every occasion for being the sort of people that we can become only as the result of doing such acts here. The point is not that God will refuse you admission to his eternal world if you have not got certain qualities of character. The point is that, if people have not got at least the beginnings of those qualities inside them, then no possible external condition could make a heaven for them. That is, could make them happy with the deep, strong, unshakable kind of happiness God intends for us. That's the end of chapter 12. All right. There are three chapters for the day. God bless. Have a good one.