Hello again, this is Chris Vogel. I'm assistant pastor at House of Grace in Hemet, California. I'm also a writer and really enjoying the incredible writer C.S. Lewis and his Mere Christianity. And we have been going through, we are now in book three, and we will be reading for our purposes, chapters 13 through 15, which is book 3, chapters 3 through 5, and we'll go ahead and get started. So, our chapter 13 is called Social Morality, so we're going through different types of morality. The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that, in this department, Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The golden rule of the New Testament, do as you would be done by, is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had always known to be right. Really, great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities. It is quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr. Johnson said, people need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed. The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old, simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see. like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump, or bringing a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk. The second thing to get clear is that Christianity has not and does not profess to have a detailed political program for applying do-as-you-would-be-done-by to a particular society at a particular moment. It could not have. It is meant for all men at all times and the particular program which suited one place or time would not suit another. And, anyhow, that is not how Christianity works. When it tells you to feed the hungry, it does not give you lessons in cookery. When it tells you to read the scriptures, it does not give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or even in English grammar. It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences. It is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal. People say the church ought to give us a lead. That is true if they mean it in the right way, but false if they mean it in the wrong way. By the church, they ought to mean the whole body of practicing Christians. And when they say that the church should give us a lead, they ought to mean that some Christians, those who happen to have the right talents, should be economists and statesmen. and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting do-as-you-would-be-done-by into action. If that happened, And if we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly. But, of course, when they ask for a lead from the church, most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political program. That is silly. The clergy are those particular people within the whole church who have been specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live forever, and we are asking them to do a quite different job for which they have not been trained. The job is really on us, the laymen. The application of Christian principles, say to trade unionism or education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters, just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists, not from the bench of bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time. All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that there are to be no passengers or parasites. If man does not work, he ought not to eat. Everyone is to work with his own hands, and what is more, everyone's work is to produce something good. There will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them. And there is to be no swank or side, no putting on airs. To that extent, a Christian society would be what we now call leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on obedience. Obedience, and outward marks of respect from all of us to properly appointed magistrates, from children to parents, and, I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular, from wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society, full of singing and rejoicing, and regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues, and the New Testament hates what is called busybodies. If there were such a society in existence, and you or I visited it, I think we should come away with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic, and in that sense advanced. but that is that its family life and its code of manners were rather old-fashioned, perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid very few of us would like the whole thing. That is just what one would expect if Christianity is the total plan for the human machine. We have all departed from the total plan in different ways, and each of us wants to make out that his own modification of the original plan is the plan itself. You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian. Everyone is attracted by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest. That is why we do not get much further. And that is why people who are fighting for quite opposite things can both say they are fighting for Christianity. Now another point. There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the modern economic system has completely disobeyed. lending money at interest, what we call investment, is the basis of our whole system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest, or usury, as they called it, they could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only thinking of the private money lender, and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said. That is a question I cannot decide on. I am not an economist, and I simply do not know whether the investment system is responsible for the state we are in or not. This is where we want the Christian economist. But I should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilizations had agreed, or so it seems at first sight, in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life. One more point and then I'm done. In the passage where the New Testament says that everyone must work, it gives as a reason in order that he may have something to give to those in need. Charity, giving to the poor, is an essential part of Christian morality. In the frightening parable of the sheep and the goats, it seems to be the point on which everything turns. Some people nowadays say that charity ought to be unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor, we ought to be producing a society in which there were no poor to give to. They may be quite right in saying that we ought to produce this kind of society, but if anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you can stop giving in the meantime, then he has parted company with all Christian morality. I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc. is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charity expenditures excludes them. I am speaking now of charities in the common way. Particular cases of distress among your own relatives, friends, neighbors, or employees, which God, as it were, forces upon your notice, may demand much more, even to the crippling and endangering of your own position. For many of us, the great obstacle to charity lies not in our luxurious living or desire for more money, but in our fear—fear of insecurity. This must often be recognized as a temptation. Sometimes our pride also hinders our charity. We are tempted to spend more than we ought on the showy forms of generosity—tipping, hospitality—and less than we ought on those who really need our help. And now, before I end, I'm going to venture on a guess as to how this section has affected any who have read it. My guess is that there are some leftist people among them who are very angry that it has not gone further in that direction, and some people of an opposite sort who are angry because they think it has gone much too far. If so, that brings us right up against the real snag in all this drawing up of blueprints for a Christian society. Most of us are not really approaching the subject in order to find out what Christianity says. We are approaching it in the hope of finding support from Christianity for the views of our own party. We are looking for an ally where we are offered either a master or a judge. I am just the same. There are bits in this section that I wanted to leave out, and that is why nothing, whatever, is going to come of such talks unless we go a much longer way around. A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really want it, and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat, do as you would be done by, till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my neighbor as myself, and I cannot learn to love my neighbor as myself till I learn to love God, and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey. And so, As I warned you, we are driven on to something more inward, driven on from social matters to religious matters, for the longest way round is the shortest way home. And that ends our chapter 13. Okay, starting chapter Fourteen, morality and psychoanalysis. I have said that we should never get a Christian society unless most of us become Christian individuals. That does not mean, of course, that we can put off doing anything about society until some imaginary date in the far future. It means that we must begin both jobs at once. One, the job of seeing how do-as-you-would-be-done-by can be applied in detail to modern society, and two, the job of becoming the sort of people who really would apply it if we saw how. I now want to begin considering what the Christian idea of a good man is, the Christian specification for the human machine. Before I come down to details, there are two more general points I should like to make. First of all, since Christian morality claims to be a technique for putting the human machine right, I think you would like to know how it is related to another technique, which seems to make a similar claim. namely psychoanalysis. Now you want to distinguish very clearly between two things, between the actual medical theories and technique of the psychoanalysts and the general philosophical view of the world which Freud and others have gone on to add to this. The second thing, the philosophy of Freud, is in direct contradiction to the other great psychologist Jung. And furthermore, when Freud is talking about how to cure neurotics, he is speaking as a specialist on his own subject. But when he goes on to talk about general philosophy, he is speaking as an amateur. It is therefore quite sensible to attend to him with respect in the one case and not in the other, and that is what I do. I am all the readier to do it because I have found that when he is talking off his own subject and on a subject I do know something about, namely language, he is very ignorant. But psychoanalysis itself, apart from all the philosophical additions that Freud and others have made to it, is not in the least contradictory to Christianity. Its technique overlaps with Christian morality at some points, and it would not be a bad thing if every person knew something about it. But it does not run the same course all the way, for the two techniques are doing rather different things. When a man makes a moral choice, two things are involved. One is the act of choosing. The other is the various feelings, impulses, and so on, which his psychological outfit presents with him, and which are the raw material of his choice. Now, this raw material may be of two kinds. Either it may be what we would call normal, it may consist of the sort of feelings that are common to all men, or else it may consist of quite unnatural feelings due to the things that have gone wrong in his subconscious. Thus fear of the things that are really dangerous would be an example of the first kind. An irrational fear of cats or spiders would be an example of the second kind. The desire of a man for a woman would be of the first kind. The perverted desire of a man for a man would be of the second. Now, what psychoanalysis undertakes to do is to remove the abnormal feelings, that is, to give the man better raw material for his acts of choice. Morality is concerned with the acts of choice themselves. Put it this way, imagine three men who go to war. One has the ordinary, natural fear of danger that any man has, and he subdues it by moral effort and becomes a brave man. Let us suppose that the other two have, as a result of things in their subconscious, exaggerated, irrational fears, which no amount of moral effort can do anything about. Now suppose that a psychoanalyst comes along and cures these two. That is, he puts them back in the position of the first man. Well, it is just then that the psychoanalytical problem is over and the moral problem begins. Because now that they are cured, these two men might take quite different lines. The first might say, Thank goodness, I've got rid of all the doodahs. Now, at last, I can do what I always wanted to do. my duty to my country." But the other might say, well, I'm very glad that I feel now moderately cool under fire, but of course, that doesn't alter the fact that I'm still jolly well determined to look after number one. and let the other chap do the dangerous job whenever I can. Indeed, one of the good things about feeling less frightened is that I can now look after myself much more efficiently and can be much cleverer at hiding the fact from the others. Now this difference is a purely moral one, and the psychoanalysis cannot do anything with it. However much you improve the man's raw material, you have still got something else, the real, free choice of the man on the material presented to him, either to put his own advantage first or to put it last. And this free choice is the only thing that morality is concerned with. The bad psychological material is not a sin, but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the VC, which is the Victoria Cross Medal of Valour. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing, does some tiny little kindness or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend. It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choice makes out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body. When his body dies, All that will fall off. fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things, which we thought our own, but which really were due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us. All sorts of nasty things, which were due to complexes or bad health, will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see everyone as he really was. There will be surprises. And that leads on to my second point. People often think of Christian morality as a kind of bargain in which God says, if you keep a lot of rules, I'll reward you, and if you don't, I'll do the other thing. I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that every time you make a choice, you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that chooses, into something a little different from what it was before, and taking your whole life as a whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your lifelong, you are slowly turning this central thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature, either into a creature that is in harmony with God and with other creatures and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of war and hatred with God and with its fellow creatures and with itself. To be the one kind of creature is heaven, that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us, at each moment, is progressing to the one state or the other. That explains what always used to puzzle me about Christian writers. They seem to be so very strict at one moment and so very free and easy at another. They talk about mere sins of thought as if they were immensely important, and then they talk about the most frightful murders and treacheries as if you had only got to repent and all would be forgiven. but I have come to see that they are right. What they are always thinking of is the mark which the action leaves on that tiny, central self, which no one sees in his life, but which each of us will have to endure or enjoy. forever. One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so placed that however angry he gets, he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted. and will make the rage worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in the central man straightened out again. Each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not. The bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters. One last point. Remember that, as I said, the right direction leads not only to peace, but to knowledge. When a man is getting better, he understands more, and more clearly, the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good. A thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly. While you are making them, you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil. bad people do not know about either. And that ends our chapter 14. I think it's really interesting, everything that he talks about. I've been going through this and making my own notes, and I feel like I transcribed the entirety of this chapter. It's just so good. He has so much there. Something that just popped into my mind right now is that he's talking about knowledge and understanding and how we drift away from those things. And, you know, a really bad person doesn't notice that they're really bad and so on. And so I'd like to add a little shameless plug in here. I have a book that I wrote called Biblical Knowledge, Understanding and Wisdom. And it kind of speaks to some of these things and that there is a progression there, a godly progression. And it's not entirely a shameless promotion there for my book, because you can go on Amazon and get the Kindle version for free. There's also a paperback copy, but you can get the book for free. It just popped into my head that I should mention that if you're interested in more about biblical knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. Anyway, For what you're really here for is our last chapter for the night, and that is chapter 15, and this is called Sexual Morality. Okay, on sexual morality, this is a great one also. We must now consider Christian morality as regards sex, what Christians call the virtue of chastity. The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of modesty, in one sense of that word, i.e. propriety or decency. The social rule of propriety lays down how much of the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be referred to and in what words, according to the customs of a given social circle. Thus, while the rule of chastity is the same for all Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes. A girl in the Pacific Islands wearing hardly any clothes and a Victorian lady completely covered in clothes might both be equally modest, proper or decent according to the standards of their own societies, and both, for all we could tell by their dress, might be equally chaste or equally unchaste. Some of the language which chaste women used in Shakespeare's time would have been used in the 19th century only by a woman completely abandoned. When people break the rule of propriety current in their own time and place, if they do so in order to excite lust in themselves or others, then they are offending against chastity. But, if they break it through ignorance or carelessness, they are guilty only of bad manners. When, as often happens, they break it defiantly in order to shock or embarrass others, they are not necessarily being unchaste, but they are being uncharitable. For it is uncharitable to take pleasure in making other people uncomfortable. I do not think that a very strict or fussy standard of propriety is any proof of chastity or any help to it, and I therefore regard the great relaxation and simplifying of the rule which has taken place in my own lifetime as a good thing. At its present stage, however, it has this inconvenience, that people of different ages and different types do not all acknowledge the same standard, and we hardly know where we are. While this confusion lasts, I think that old or old-fashioned people should be very careful not to assume that young or emancipated people are corrupt whenever they are, by the old standard, improper, and, in return, that young people should not call their elders prudes or puritans because they do not easily adopt the new standard. A real desire to believe all the good you can of others, and to make others as comfortable as you can, will solve most of the problems. Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it. The Christian rule is either marriage with complete faithfulness to your partner or else total abstinence. Now this is a difficult and so contrary to our instincts that obviously either Christianity is wrong or our sexual instinct as it is now has gone wrong. one or the other. Of course, being a Christian, I think it is the instinct which has gone wrong. But I have other reasons for thinking so. The biological purpose of sex is children, just as the biological purpose of eating is to repair the body. Now, if we eat whenever we feel inclined, and just as much as we want, it is quite true most of us will eat too much, but not terrifically too much. One man may eat enough for two, but he does not eat enough for ten. The appetite goes a little beyond its biological purpose, but not enormously. But if a healthy young man indulged his sexual appetite whenever he felt inclined, and if each act produced a baby, then in ten years he might easily populate a small village. This appetite is in ludicrous and preposterous excess of its function. or take it another way. You can get a large audience together for a strip-tease act, that is, to watch a girl undress on the stage. Now suppose you come to a country where you could fill a theater by simply bringing a covered plate onto the stage and then slowly lifting the cover so as to let everyone see, just before the lights went out, that it contained a mutton chop or a bit of bacon. Would you not think that in that country something had gone wrong with the appetite for food? And would not anyone who had grown up in a different world think there was something equally queer about the state of the sex instinct among us? One critic said that if he found a country in which such striptease acts with food were popular, he would conclude that the people of that country were starving. He meant, of course, to imply that such things as the striptease act resulted not from sexual corruption, but from sexual starvation. I agree with him that if In some strange land, we found that similar acts with mutton chops were popular. One of the possible explanations which would occur to me would be famine. But the next step would be to test our hypothesis by finding out whether, in fact, much or little food was being consumed in that country. If the evidence showed that a good deal was being eaten, then of course we should have to abandon the hypothesis of starvation and try to think of another one. In the same way, before accepting sexual starvation as the cause of the striptease, we should have to look for evidence that there is, in fact, more sexual abstinence in our age than in those ages when things like the striptease were unknown. But surely there is no such evidence. Contraceptives have made sexual indulgence far less costly within marriage and far safer outside it than before. And public opinion is less hostile to illicit unions and even to perversion than it has been since pagan times. Nor is the hypothesis of starvation the only one we can imagine. Everyone knows that the sexual appetite, like our other appetites, grows by indulgence. Starving men may think much about food, but so do gluttons. The gorged as well as the famished, like titillations. Here is a third point. You find very few people who want to eat things that really are not food, or to do other things with food instead of eating it. In other words, perversions of the food appetite are rare, but perversions of the sex instinct are numerous, hard to cure, and frightful. I am sorry to have to go into all these details, but I must. The reason why I must is that you and I, for the last 20 years, have been fed all day long on good solid lies about sex. We have been told, till one is sick of hearing it, that sexual desire is in the same state as any of our other natural desires, and that if only we abandon the silly old Victorian idea of hushing it up, everything in the garden will be lovely. It is not true. The moment you look at the facts and away from the propaganda, you see that it is not. They tell you sex has become a mess because it was hushed up, but for the last 20 years it has not been. It has been chattered about all day long, yet it is still a mess. If hushing up had been the cause of the trouble, ventilation would have set it right, but it has not. I think it is the other way around. I think the human race originally hushed it up because it had become such a mess. Modern people are always saying sex is nothing to be ashamed of. They may mean two things. They may mean there is nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way, nor in the fact that it gives pleasure. If they mean that, they are right. Christianity says the same. It is not the thing nor the pleasure that is the trouble. The old Christian teachers said that if man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now, would have actually been greater. I know some muddle-headed Christians who have talked as if Christianity thought that sex or the body or pleasure were bad in themselves, but they were wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body, which believes that matter is good, that God himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness or beauty and our energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion, and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But, of course, when people say sex is nothing to be ashamed of, they may mean the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of. If they mean that, I think they are wrong. I think it is everything to be ashamed of. There is nothing to be ashamed of in enjoying your food. There would be everything to be ashamed of if half the world made food the main interest of their lives and spent their time looking at pictures of food and dribbling and smacking their lips. I do not say you and I are individually responsible for the present situation. Our ancestors have handed over to us organisms which are warped in this respect. and we grow up surrounded by propaganda in favor of unchastity. There are people who want to keep our sex instinct inflamed in order to make money out of us. Because, of course, a man with an obsession is a man who has very little sales resistance. God knows our situation. He will not judge us as if we had no difficulties to overcome. What matters is the sincerity and pervasiveness of our will to overcome them. Before we can be cured, we must want to be cured. Those who really wish for help will get it. But for many modern people, even the wish is difficult. It is easy to think that we want something when we do not really want it. A famous Christian long ago told us that when he was a young man, he prayed constantly for chastity. But years later, he realized that while his lips had been saying, oh Lord, make me chaste, his heart had been secretly adding, but please don't do it just yet. This may happen in prayers for other virtues too, but there are three reasons why it is now specially difficult for us to desire, let alone to achieve complete chastity. In the first place, our warped natures, the devils who tempt us, and all the contemporary propaganda for lust, combine to make us feel that the desires we are resisting are so natural, so healthy, and so reasonable, that it is almost perverse and abnormal to resist them. Poster after poster, film after film, novel after novel, associate the idea of sexual indulgence with the ideas of health, normality, youth, frankness, and good humor. Now this association is a lie. Like all powerful lies, it is based on a truth, the truth acknowledged above, that sex in itself, apart from the excesses and obsessions that have grown round it, is normal and healthy, and all the rest of it. The lie consists in the suggestion that any sexual act to which you are tempted at the moment is also healthy and normal. Now this, on any conceivable view, and quite apart from Christianity, must be nonsense. Surrender to all our desires obviously leads to impotence, disease, jealousies, lies, concealment, and everything that is the reverse of health. Good humor and frankness. For any happiness, even in this world, quite a lot of restraint is going to be necessary. So the claim made by every desire, when it is strong, to be healthy and reasonable, counts for nothing. Every sane and civilized man must have some set of principles by which he chooses to reject some of his desires and to permit others. One man does this on Christian principles, another on hygienic principles. on sociological principles. The real conflict is not between Christianity and nature, but between Christian principles and other principles in the control of nature. For nature, in the sense of natural desire, will have to be controlled anyway, unless you are going to ruin your whole life. The Christian principles are, admittedly, stricter than the others, but then we think you will get help towards obeying them, which you will not get towards obeying the others. In the second place, many people are deterred from seriously attempting Christian chastity because they think, before trying, that it is impossible. But when a thing has to be attempted, one must never think about possibility or impossibility. Faced with an optional question in an examination paper, one considers whether one can do it or not. Faced with a compulsory question, one must do the best one can. You may get some marks for a very imperfect answer. You will certainly get none for leaving the question alone, not only in examinations but in war. in mountain climbing, in learning to skate or swim or ride a bicycle, even in fastening a stiff collar with cold fingers. Perhaps quite often do what seem, people quite often do what seemed impossible before they did it. It is wonderful what you can do when you have to. We may, indeed, be sure that perfect chastity, like perfect charity, will not be attained by any merely human efforts. You must ask for God's help. Even when you have done so, it may seem to you for a long time that no help, or less help than you need, is being given. Never mind. After each failure, ask forgiveness, pick yourself up, and try again. Very often, what God first helps us towards is not the virtue itself, but just this power of always trying again. For however important chastity, or courage, or truthfulness, or any other virtue, may be, this process trains us in habits of the soul which are more important still. It cures our illusions about ourselves and teaches us to depend on God. We learn, on the other hand, that we cannot trust ourselves even in our best moments, and, on the other, that we need not despair even in our worst, for our failures are forgiven. The only fatal thing is to sit down content with anything less than perfection. Thirdly, people often misunderstand what psychology teaches about repressions. It teaches us that repressed sex is dangerous, but repressed is here a technical term. It does not mean suppressed in the sense of denied, or restricted. A repressed desire or thought is one which has been thrust into the subconscious, usually at a very early age, and can now come before the mind only in a disguised and unrecognizable form. Repressed sexuality does not appear to be the patient to, sorry, repressed sexuality does not appear to the patient to be sexuality at all. When an adolescent or an adult is engaged in resisting a conscious desire, he is not dealing with a repression, nor is he in the least danger of creating a repression. On the contrary, those who are seriously attempting chastity are more conscious and soon know a great deal more about their own sexuality than anyone else. They come to know their desire as Wellington knew Napoleon, or as Sherlock Holmes knew Moriarty, as a rat-catcher knows rats, or a plumber knows about leaky pipes. Virtue, even attempted virtue, brings light. Indulgence brings fog. Finally, though I have had to speak at some length about sex, I want to make it clear, as possible, that the center of Christian morality is not here. If anyone thinks that Christians regard unchastity as the supreme vice, he is quite wrong. The sins of the flesh are bad, but they are the least bad of all sins. All the worst pleasures are purely spiritual. the pleasure of putting other people in the wrong, of bossing and patronizing and spoiling sport and backbiting, the pleasures of power, of hatred. For there are two things inside me, competing with the human self which I must try to become. They are the animal self and the diabolical self. The diabolical self is the worst of the two. That is why a cold, self-righteous prig who goes regularly to church may be far nearer to hell than a prostitute. But of course, it is better to be neither." And with that amazing little comment, we have ended chapter 15. Thank you for your time, and I will try and get the next set up as quickly as possible. God bless.