Welcome back to our reading of C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. This is the second to the last recording. We're going to be going through Book 4, and that is going to be chapters 6, 7, and 8. For our purposes, chapters 28, 29, and 30. And book four is called Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity. And I feel like these three chapters are a little bit less about the theology, quite a bit less about the theology of the Trinity, and more about personal application as how it applies to us Christians, which is great. and certainly needed in my life, and I would assume in yours also. So, we can go ahead and start with chapter 28, which is called Two Notes. In order to avoid misunderstanding, I here add notes on two points arising out of the last chapter. Number one, one sensible critic, wrote asking me why, if God wanted sons instead of toy soldiers, he did not beget many sons at the outset instead of first making toy soldiers and then bringing them to life by such a difficult and painful process. One part of the answer to this question is fairly easy. The other part is probably beyond all human knowledge. The easy part is this. The process of being turned from a creature into a son would not have been difficult or painful if the human race had not turned away from God centuries ago. They were able to do this because He gave them free will. He gave them free will because a world of mere automata could never love and therefore never know infinite happiness. The difficult part is this. All Christians are agreed that there is, in the full and original sense, only one Son of God. If we insist on asking, but could there have been many, we find ourselves in very deep water. have the words could have been in any sense at all when applied to God? You can say that one particular finite thing could have been different from what it is because it would have been different if something else had been different, and the something else would have been different if some third thing had been different, and so on. The letters on this page would have been read if the printer had used red ink, and he would have used red ink if he had been instructed to, and so on. But when you are talking about God, i.e. about the rock-bottom, irreducible fact on which all other facts depend, it is nonsensical to ask if it could have been otherwise. It is what it is, and there is an end of the matter. But quite apart from this, I find a difficulty about the very idea of the Father begetting many sons from all eternity. In order to be many, they would have to be somehow different from one another? Two pennies have the same shape. How are they two by occupying different places and containing different atoms? In other words, to think of them as different, we have to have to bring in space and matter. In fact, we have had to bring in nature or the created universe. I can understand the distinction between the father and the son without bringing in space or matter because the one begets and the other is begotten. The father's relation to the son is not the same as the son's relation to the father. But if there were several sons, they would all be related to one another and to the father in the same way. how would they differ from one another? One does not notice the difficulty at first, of course. One thinks one can form the idea of several suns. But when I think closely, I find that the idea seemed possible only because I was vaguely imagining them as human forms standing about together in some kind of space. In other words, though I pretended to be thinking about something that exists before any universe was made, I was really smuggling in the picture of a universe and putting that something inside it. When I stop doing that and still try to think of the Father begetting many sons before all worlds, I find I am not really thinking of anything. The idea fades away into mere words. Was nature, space and time and matter created precisely in order to make many-ness possible? Is there perhaps no other way of getting many eternal spirits except by first making many natural creatures in a universe and then spiritualizing them, but of course all of this is guesswork. 2. The idea that the whole human race is, in a sense, one thing, one huge organism, like a tree. must not be confused with the idea that individual differences do not matter or that real people, Tom and Nobby and Kate, are somehow less important than collective things like classes, races, and so forth. Indeed, the two ideas are opposites. Things which are parts of a single organism may be very different from one another. Things which are not may be very alike. Six pennies are quite separate and very alike. My nose and my lungs are very different, but they are only alive at all because they are parts of my body and share its common life. Christianity thinks of human individuals not as mere members of a group or items in a list, but as organs in a body, different from one another, and each contributing what no other could. When you find yourself wanting to turn your children or pupils or even your neighbors into people exactly like yourself, remember that God probably never meant them to be that. You and they are different organs intended to do different things. On the other hand, when you are tempted not to bother about someone else's troubles because they are no business of yours, remember that though he is different from you, he is part of the same organism as you. If you forget that he belongs to the same organism as yourself, you will become an individualist. If you forget that he is a different organ from you, if you want to suppress differences and make people all alike, you will become a totalitarian. But a Christian must not be either a totalitarian or an individualist. I feel a strong desire to tell you, and I expect you feel a strong desire to tell me, which of these two errors is the worst. That is the devil getting at us. He always sends errors into the world in pairs, pairs of opposites. And he always encourages us to spend a lot of time thinking which is the worst. You see why, of course. He relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one. But do not let us be fooled. We have to keep our eyes on the goal and go straight through between both errors. We have no other concern than that with either of them." And that ends the pretty quick chapter, chapter 28. So we'll move into our chapter 29, which is called Let's Pretend, and this is quite a bit longer. May I once again start by putting two pictures, or two stories rather, into your minds. One is the story you have all read called Beauty and the Beast. The girl, you remember, had to marry a monster for some reason, and she did. She kissed it as if it were a man, and then, much to her relief, it really turned into a man and all went well. The other story is about someone who had to wear a mask. a mask which made him look much nicer than he really was. He had to wear it for years, and when he took it off, he found his own face had grown to fit it. He was now really beautiful, what had begun as disguise and become a reality. I think both these stories may, in a fanciful way of course, help to illustrate what I have to say in this chapter. Up till now, I have been trying to describe facts, what God is and what he has done. Now I want to talk about practice. What do we do next? What difference does all this theology make? It can start making a difference tonight. If you are interested enough to have read thus far, you are probably interested enough to make a shot at saying your prayers. And whatever else you say, you will probably say the Lord's Prayer. Its very first words are, Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean, quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending. Because, of course, the moment you realize what the words mean, you realize that you are not a son of God. You are not a being like the Son of God, whose will and interests are at one with those of the Father. You are a bundle of self-centered fears, hopes, greeds, jealousies, and self-conceit, all doomed to death. so that, in a way, this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek. But the odd thing is that he has ordered us to do it. Why? What is the good of pretending to be what you are not? Well, even on the human level, you know, there are two kinds of pretending. There is a bad kind, where the pretense is there instead of the real thing, as when a man pretends he is going to help you instead of really helping you. But there is also a good kind, where the pretense leads up to the real thing. when you are not feeling particularly friendly, but know you ought to be. The best thing you can do, very often, is to put on a friendly manner and behave as if you were a nicer person than you actually are. And in a few minutes, as we have all noticed, you will be really feeling friendlier than you were. Very often, the only way to get equality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That is why children's games are so important. They are always pretending to be grown-ups, playing soldiers, playing shop, but all the time, they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits so that the pretense of being grown-up helps them to grow up in earnest. Now the moment you realize, here I am dressing up as Christ, it is extremely likely that you will see at once some way in which, at the very moment, the pretense could be made less of a pretense and more of a reality. You will find several things going on in your mind, which would not be going on there if you were really a son of God. Well, stop them. Or you may realize that instead of saying your prayers, you ought to be downstairs writing a letter or helping your wife to wash up. Well, go ahead and do it. You see what is happening. The Christ himself, the son of God, who is man, just like you, and God, just like his father, is actually at your side and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretense into a reality. This is not merely a fancy way of saying that your conscience is telling you what to do. If you simply ask your conscience, you get one result. If you remember that you are dressing up as Christ, you get a different one. There are lots of things which your conscience might not call definitely wrong. especially things in your mind, but which you will see at once you cannot go on doing if you are seriously trying to be like Christ. For you are no longer thinking simply about right and wrong. You are trying to catch the good infection from a person." And he capitalizes person, so it must be one of the Trinity. It is more like painting a portrait than like obeying a set of rules. And the odd thing is that while in one way it is much harder than keeping rules, in another way it is far easier. The real son of God is at your side. He's beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as himself. He is beginning, so to speak, to inject his kind of life and thought, his Zoe, into you. beginning to turn the tin soldier into a live man. The part of you that does not like it is the part that is still tin. Some of you may feel that this is very unlike your own experience. You may say, I've never had the sense of being helped by an invisible Christ, but I often have been helped by other human beings. That is rather like the woman in the first war who said that if there were a bread shortage, it would not bother her house because they always ate toast. If there is no bread, there will be no toast. If there were no help from Christ, there would be no help from other human beings. He works on us in all sorts of ways, not only through what we think our religious life. He works through nature, through our own bodies, through books, sometimes through experiences which seem, at the time, anti-Christian. When a young man who has been going to church in a routine way honestly realizes that he does not believe in Christianity and stops going, provided he does it for honesty's sake and not just to annoy his parents, the Spirit of Christ is probably nearer to him than it ever was before. But above all, he works on us through each other. Men are mirrors or carriers of Christ to other men, sometimes unconscious carriers. This good infection can be carried by those who have not got it themselves. People who were not Christians themselves helped me to Christianity. but usually it is those who know him that bring him to others. That is why the church, the whole body of Christians showing him to one another, is so important. You might say that when two Christians are following Christ together, there is not twice as much Christianity as when they are apart, but 16 times as much. But do not forget this. At first, it is natural for a baby to take its mother's milk without knowing its mother. It is equally natural for us to see the man who helps us without seeing Christ behind him. But we must not remain babies. we must go on to recognize the real giver. It is madness not to. Because if we do not, we shall be relying on human beings, and that is going to let us down. The best of them will make mistakes. All of them will die. We must be thankful to all the people who have helped us. We must honor them and love them, but never, never pin your whole faith on any human being. Not if he is the best and wisest in the whole world. There are lots of nice things you can do with sand, but do not try building a house on it. And now we begin to see what it is that the New Testament is always talking about. It talks about Christians being born again. It talks about them putting on Christ, about Christ being formed in us, about our coming to have the mind of Christ. Put right out of your head the idea that these are only fancy ways of saying that Christians are to read what Christ said and try to carry it out, as a man may read what Plato or Marx said and try and carry it out. They mean something much more than that. They mean that a real person, Christ, here and now, in that very room where you are saying your prayers, is doing things to you. It is not a question of a good man who died 2,000 years ago. It is a living man, still as much a man as you, and still as much God as he was when he created the world. really coming and interfering with your very self, killing the old natural self in you and replacing it with the kind of self he has, at first only for moments, then for longer periods, finally, if all goes well, turning you permanently into a different sort of thing, into a new little Christ, a being which, in its own small way, has the same kind of life as God. which shares in His power, joy, knowledge, and eternity. And soon, we make two other discoveries. Number one, we begin to notice, besides our particular sinful acts, our sinfulness. Begin to be alarmed, not only about what we do, but about what we are. This may sound rather difficult, so I will try to make it clear from my own case. When I come to my evening prayers and try to reckon up the sins of the day, nine times out of ten, the most obvious one is some sin against charity. I have sulked, or snapped, or sneered, or snubbed, or stormed. And the excuse that immediately springs to my mind is that the provocation was so sudden and unexpected. I was caught off my guard. I had not time to collect myself. Now that may be an extenuating circumstance as regards those particular acts. They would obviously be worse if they had been deliberate and premeditated. On the other hand, surely what a man does when he is taken off his guard is the best evidence for what sort of a man he is. Surely what pops out before the man has time to put on a disguise is the truth. If there are rats in a cellar, you are most likely to see them if you go in very suddenly. But the suddenness does not create the rats, it only prevents them from hiding. In the same way the suddenness of the provocation does not make an ill-tempered man, it only shows me what an ill-tempered man I am. The rats are always there in the cellar. But if you go in shouting and noisily, they will have taken cover before you switch on the light. Apparently the rats of resentment and vindictiveness are always there in the cellar of my soul. Now that cellar is out of reach of my conscious will. I can to some extent control my acts. I have no direct control over my temperament. And if, as I said before, what we are matters even more than what we do. If, indeed, what we do matters chiefly as evidence of what we are, then it follows that the change which I most need to undergo is a change that my own direct voluntary efforts cannot bring about. And this applies to my good actions, too. How many of them were done for the right motive? How many for fear of public opinion or a desire to show off? How many from a sort of obstinacy or sense of superiority, which, in different circumstances, might equally have led to some very bad act? But I cannot. by direct moral effort, give myself new motives. After the first few steps in the Christian life, we realize that everything which really needs to be done in our souls can be done only by God. And that brings us to something which has been very misleading in my language up to now. Number two, I have been talking as if it were we who did everything. In reality, of course, it is God who does everything. We, at most, allow it to be done to us. In a sense, you might even say it is God who does the pretending. The three-personal God, so to speak, sees before him, in fact, a self-centered, greedy, grumbling, rebellious human animal But he says, Let us pretend that this is not a mere creature, but our Son. It is like Christ insofar as it is a man, for he became man. Let us pretend that it is also like him in spirit. Let us treat it as if it were what in fact it is not. Let us pretend in order to make the pretense into a reality. And he ends his quote of God there. God looks at you as if you were a little Christ. Christ stands beside you to turn you into one. I dare say this idea of a divine make-believe sounds rather strange at first. But is it so strange really? Is not? That how the higher thing always raises the lower? A mother teaches her baby to talk by talking to it as if it understood long before it really does. We treat our dogs as if they were almost human. That is why they really become almost human in the end. That's the end of chapter 29. going to get ready to read our final chapter for this recording. So this will be our chapter 30, which is chapter 8 of book 4, and it is called, Is Christianity Hard or Easy? In the previous chapter, we were considering the Christian idea of putting on Christ, or first dressing up as a son of God, in order that you may finally become a real son. What I want to make clear is that this is not one among many jobs a Christian has to do, and it is not a sort of special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of Christianity. Christianity offers nothing else at all. And I should like to point out how it differs from ordinary ideas of morality and being good. The ordinary idea which we all have before we become Christians is this. We take as starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and interests. We then admit that something else, call it morality or decent behavior or the good of society, has claims on this self, claims which interfere with its own desires. What we mean by being good is giving in to those claims. Some of the things the ordinary self wanted to do turn out to be what we call wrong. Well, we must give them up. Other things which the self did not want to do turn out to be what we call right. Well, we shall have to do them. But we are hoping all the time that when all the demands have been met, the poor natural self will still have some chance and some time to get on with its own life and to do what it likes. In fact, we are very like an honest man paying his taxes. He pays them all right, but he does hope that there will be enough left over for him to live on, because we are still taking our natural self as the starting point. As long as we are thinking that way, one or other, of two results is likely to follow. Either we give up trying to be good, or else we become very unhappy indeed. For, make no mistake, if you are really going to try to meet all the demands made on the natural self, it will not have enough left over to live on. The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you, and your natural self, which is thus being starved and hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier and angrier. In the end, you will either give up trying to be good or else become one of those people who, as they say, live for others, but always in a discontented, grumbling way, always wondering why the others do not notice it more and always making a martyr of yourself. And once you have become that, You will be a far greater pest to anyone who has to live with you than you would have been if you had remained frankly selfish. The Christian way is different, harder and easier. Christ says, give me all. I don't want so much of your time and so much of your money and so much of your work. I want you. I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it. No half measures are any good. I don't want to cut off a branch here and a branch there. I want to have the whole tree down. I don't want to drill the tooth or crown it or stop it, but to have it out. Hand over the whole natural self, all the desires which you think innocent as well as the ones you think wicked, the whole outfit. I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you myself. My own will shall become yours." And that ends Jesus's hypothetical quote there. Both harder and easier than what we are all trying to do. You have noticed, I expect, that Christ himself sometimes describes the Christian way as very hard, sometimes as very easy. He says, take up your cross. In other words, it is like going to be beaten to death in a concentration camp. Next minute, he says, my yoke is easy and my burden is light. He means both. And one can just see why both are true. Teachers will tell you that the laziest boy in the class is the one who works hardest in the end. They mean this. If you give two boys, say, a proposition in geometry to do, the one who is prepared to take trouble will try to understand it. The lazy boy will try to learn it by heart because, for the moment, that needs less effort. But six months later, when they are preparing for an exam, that lazy boy is doing hours and hours of miserable drudgery over things the other boy understands and positively enjoys in just a few minutes. Laziness means more work in the long run, or look at it this way. In a battle, or in mountain climbing, there is often one thing which it takes a lot of pluck to do. But it is also, in the long run, the safest thing to do. If you funk it, you will find yourself hours later in a far worse danger. The cowardly thing is also the most dangerous thing. It is like that here. The terrible thing, the almost impossible thing, is to hand over your whole self, all your wishes and precautions, to Christ. but it is far easier than what we are all trying to do instead. For what we are trying to do is remain what we call ourselves, to keep personal happiness as our great aim in life, and yet at the same time be good. We are all trying to let our mind and heart go their own way, centered on money or pleasure or ambition, and hoping in spite of this to behave honestly and chastely and humbly. And that is exactly what Christ warned us you could not do. As he said, a thistle cannot produce figs. If I am a field that contains nothing but grass seed, I cannot produce wheat. Cutting the grass may keep it short, but I shall still produce grass and no wheat. If I want to produce wheat, the change must go deeper than the surface. I must be plowed up and re-sown. That is why the real problem of the Christian life comes where people do not usually look for it. It comes the very moment you wake up each morning. All your wishes and hopes for the day rush at you like wild animals, and the first job each morning consists simply in shoving them all back, in listening to that other voice, taking that other point of view, letting that other larger, stronger, quieter life come flowing in. and so on, all day, standing back from all your natural fussings and frettings, coming in out of the wind. We can only do it for moments at first, but from those moments, the new sort of life will be spreading through our system, because now we are letting him work at the right part of us. It is the difference between paint, which is merely laid on the surface, and a dye or stain which soaks right through. He never talked vague, idealistic gas. When he said, be perfect, he meant it. He meant that we must go in for the full treatment. It is hard. But the sort of compromise we are all hankering after is harder. In fact, it is impossible. It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird. It would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present, and you cannot go indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad. May I come back to what I said before? This is the whole of Christianity. There is nothing else. It is so easy to get muddled about that. It is easy to think that the church has a lot of different objectives. Education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it is easy to think the state has a lot of different objects, military, political, economic, and whatnot. But in a way, things are much simpler than that. The state exists simply to promote and to protect the ordinary happiness of human beings in this life. A husband and wife chatting over a fire, a couple of friends having a game of darts in a pub, a man reading a book in his own room or digging in his own garden, that is what the state is for, and unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such movements, excuse me, moments, all the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economies, etc., are simply a waste of time. In the same way, the church exists for nothing else but to draw men into Christ, to make them little Christs, If they are not doing that, all the cathedrals, clergy, missions, sermons, even the Bible itself are simply a waste of time. God became man for no other purpose. It is even doubtful, you know, whether the whole universe was created for any other purpose. It says in the Bible that the whole universe was made for Christ and that everything is to be gathered together in Him. I do not suppose any of us can understand how this will happen as regards the whole universe. We do not know what, if anything, lives in the parts of it that are millions of miles away from this earth. Even on this earth, we do not know how it applies to things other than men. After all, that is what you would expect. We have been shown the plan only in so far as it concerns ourselves. I sometimes like to imagine that I can see how it might apply to other things. I think I can see how the higher animals are in a sense drawn into man when he loves them and makes them, as he does, much more nearly human than they would otherwise be. I can even see a sense in which the dead things and plants are drawn into man as he studies them and uses and appreciates them. And if there were intelligent creatures in other worlds, they might do the same with their worlds. It might be that when intelligent creatures entered into Christ, they would, in that way, bring all the other things in along with them. But I do not know. It is only a guess. What we have been told is how we men can be drawn into Christ, can become part of that wonderful present which the young prince of the universe wants to offer to his father. That present which is in himself and therefore us in him. It is the only thing we were made for. And there are strange, exciting hints in the Bible that when we are drawn in, a great many other things in nature will begin to come right. The bad dream will be over. It will be morning. And that's the end of our reading today. I hope that it helps you. I hope that it challenges you and draws you into becoming like Christ. So until next time, our last time together, I'll go ahead and sign off. God bless.