All right, we've made it. We are on the homestretch. This is the last installment of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. And it's been a journey. I feel like we're kind of friends having gone through all of this. You must love Mere Christianity as much as I do. And we've gotten to hang out together. My name is Chris Fogle. I'm a pastor and an author, and I've really not wanted the reading of C.S. Lewis to be, I don't know, self-beneficial, if you will, in any way. I wanted these to be free and you getting to have a book on tape, if you will. But I would like to connect with you if you've enjoyed this, if you want more C.S. Lewis. I just know mere Christianity just stands out to me. I love quoting from it. I have a Twitter account if you want to reach out. It's at the Chris Fogel, and Fogel is F-O-G-L-E. If you're interested, I put up some quotes from C.S. Lewis and some other things, of course. Not a whole lot and you can take that or leave it. There are some really good sort of more official Twitter accounts for some really good quotes and this is just this indelible amazing theology, written, you know, depending on when you're listening to this, decades and decades ago, let's just say that, and it's still so applicable to today. I turn on the news ten years ago, turn it on today, There are still people that are believing certain things and misunderstanding the truths around Jesus and how we're supposed to be living as Christians. And so I won't spend much more time just talking your ear off here. We are going to get into our final section of Mere Christianity, but it's been really cool to be able to go through this with you and enjoy this. And these last three chapters are pretty meaty. They're not just little quick ones. So buckle up. These are going to be from Book 4. These are going to be chapters 9, 10, and 11. For us, it'll be chapters 31 through 33. And 31 is called Counting the Cost, which is a great title. I find a good many people have been bothered by what I said in the previous chapter about our Lord's words, be ye perfect. Some people seem to think this means, unless you are perfect, I will not help you. and as we cannot be perfect, then if he meant that, our position is hopeless. But I do not think he did mean that. I think he meant the only help I will give is help to become perfect. You may want something less, but I will give you nothing less. Let me explain. When I was a child, I often had toothache. And I knew that if I went to my mother, she would give me something which would deaden the pain for that night and let me go to sleep. But I did not go to my mother, at least not till the pain became very bad. And the reason I did not go was this. I did not doubt she would give me the aspirin, but I knew she would also do something else. I knew she would take me to the dentist next morning. I could not get what I wanted out of her without getting something more which I did not want. I wanted immediate relief from pain, but I could not get it without having my teeth set permanently right. And I knew those dentists. I knew they started fiddling about with all sorts of other teeth which had not yet begun to ache. They would not let sleeping dogs lie. If you gave them an inch, they took an L. Now, if I may put it that way, our Lord is like the dentists. If you give him an inch, he will take an L. Dozens of people go to him to be cured of some one particular sin which they are ashamed of, like masturbation or physical cowardice, or which is obviously spoiling daily life, like bad temper or drunkenness. Well, he will cure it all right, but he will not stop there. That may be all you asked, but if once you call him in, he will give you the full treatment. That is why he warned people to count the cost before becoming Christians. Make no mistake, he says, if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in my hands, that is what you are in for, nothing less or other than that. You have free will, and if you choose, you can push me away. But if you do not push me away, understand that I am going to see this job through. Whatever suffering it may cost you in your earthly life, whatever inconceivable purification it may cost you after death, whatever it costs me, I will never rest. nor let you rest until you are literally perfect, until my father can say without reservation that he is well pleased with you, as he said he was well pleased with me. This I can do, and will do, but I will not do anything less." And that ends the quote. And yet, this is the other and equally important side of it. This helper, who will, in the long run, be satisfied with nothing less than absolute perfection, will also be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty. As a great Christian writer, George MacDonald, pointed out, every father is pleased at the baby's first attempt to walk. No father would be satisfied with anything less than a firm, free, manly walk in a grown-up son. In the same way, he said, God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy. The practical upshot is this. On the one hand, God's demand for perfection need not discourage you in the least in your present attempts to be good or even in your present failures. Each time you fall, he will pick you up again, and he knows perfectly well that your own efforts are never going to bring you anywhere near perfection. On the other hand, you must realize from the outset that the goal towards which he is beginning to guide you is absolute perfection, and no power in the whole universe except you yourself can prevent him from taking you to that goal. That is what you are in for. and it is very important to realize that. If we do not, then we are very likely to start pulling back and resisting Him after a certain point. I think that many of us, when Christ has enabled us to overcome one or two sins that were an obvious nuisance, are inclined to feel, though we do not put it into words, that we are now good enough. He has done all He wanted Him to do. and we should be obliged if he would now leave us alone. As we say, I never expected to be a saint. I only wanted to be a decent, ordinary chap. And we imagine, when we say this, that we are being humble. But this is the fatal mistake. Of course we never wanted and never asked to be made into the sort of creatures he is going to make us into. But the question is not what we intended ourselves to be, but what he intended us to be when he made us. He is the inventor. We are only the machine. He is the painter. We are only the picture. How should we know what He means us to be like? You see, He has already made us something very different from what we were. Long ago, before we were born, when we were inside our mother's bodies, we passed through various stages. We were once rather like vegetables, and once rather like fish. It was only at a later stage that we became like human babies, and if we had been conscious at those earlier stages, I dare say we should have been quite contented to stay as vegetables or fish, should not have wanted to be made into babies. But all the same, he knew his plan for us and was determined to carry it out. Something the same is now happening at a higher level. We may be content to remain what we call ordinary people, but he is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility, it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania, it is obedience. Here is another way of putting the two sides of the truth. On the one hand, we must never imagine that our own unaided efforts can be relied on to carry us even through the next 24 hours as decent people. If he does not support us, not one of us is safe from some gross sin. On the other hand, no possible degree of holiness or heroism, which has ever been recorded, of the greatest saints is beyond what he is determined to produce in every one of us in the end. The job will not be completed in this life, but he means to get us, as far as possible, before death. That is why we must not be surprised if we are in for a rough time. When a man turns to Christ and seems to be getting on pretty well, in the sense that some of his bad habits are now corrected, he often feels that it would now be natural if things went fairly smoothly. When trouble comes along, illnesses, money troubles, new kinds of temptation, he is disappointed. These things, he feels, might have been necessary to rouse him and make him repent in his bad old days, but why now? Because God is forcing him on or up to a higher level, putting him into situations where he will have to be very much braver or more patient or more loving than he ever dreamed of being before. It seems to us all unnecessary, but that is because we have not yet had the slightest notion of the tremendous things he means to make of us. I find I must borrow yet another parable from George MacDonald. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what he is doing. He's getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on. You knew that those jobs needed doing and so you're not surprised. But presently, he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is he up to? The explanation is that he is building quite a different house from the one you thought of. throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage, but he is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. The command, be ye perfect, is not idealistic gas, nor is it a command to do the impossible. He is going to make us into creatures that can obey that command. He said, in the Bible, that we were gods, and he is going to make good his words. If we let him, for we can prevent him if we choose, he will make the feeblest and filthy of us into a god or goddess. A dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine. A bright, stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly, though of course on a smaller scale. His own boundless power and delight and goodness. The process will be long and in parts very painful, but that is what we are in for, nothing less. He meant what He said. And that ends the chapter. All right, chapter 32. Nice people or new men. He meant what he said. Those who put themselves in his hands will become perfect. as he is perfect, perfect in love, wisdom, joy, beauty, and immortality. The change will not be completed in this life, for death is an important part of the treatment. How far the change will have gone before death in any particular Christian is uncertain. I think this is the right moment to consider a question which is often asked. If Christianity is true, why are not all Christians obviously nicer than all non-Christians? What lies behind that question is partly something very reasonable and partly something that is not reasonable at all. The reasonable part is this. If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man's outward actions, if he continues to be just as snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before, then I think we must suspect that his conversion was largely imaginary and after one's original conversion every time one thinks one has made an advance, that is the test to apply. Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in religion mean nothing unless they make our actual behavior better. Just as in an illness, feeling better is not much good if the thermometer shows that your temperature is still going up. In that sense, the outer world is quite right to judge Christianity by its results. Christ told us to judge by results. A tree is known by its fruit, or, as we say, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world. The wartime posters told us that careless talk costs lives. It is equally true that careless lives cost talk. Our careless lives set the outer world talking, and we give them grounds for talking in a way that throws doubt on the truth of Christianity itself. But there is another way of demanding results in which the outer world may be quite illogical. They may demand not merely that each man's life should improve if he becomes a Christian, they may also demand before they believe in Christianity that they should see the whole world neatly divided into two camps, Christian and non-Christian. and that all the people in the first camp, at any given moment, should be obviously nicer than all the people in the second. This is unreasonable on several grounds. Number one, in the first place, the situation in the actual world is much more complicated than that. The world does not consist of 100% Christians and 100% non-Christians. There are people, a great many of them, who are slowly ceasing to be Christians, but who still call themselves by that name, some of them clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians, though they do not yet call themselves so. There are people who do not accept the full Christian doctrine about Christ, but who are so strongly attracted by him that they are his in a much deeper sense than they themselves understand. there are people in other religions who are being led by God's secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it. For example, a Buddhist of goodwill may be led to concentrate more and more on the Buddhist teaching about mercy and to leave in the background, though he might still say he believed, the Buddhist teaching on certain other points. Many of the good pagans long before Christ's birth may have been in this position. And always, of course, there are a great many people who are just confused in mind and have a lot of inconsistent beliefs all jumbled up together. Consequently, It is not much use trying to make judgments about Christians and non-Christians in the Mass. It is some use comparing cats and dogs, or even men and women, in the Mass, because there one knows definitely which is which. Also, an animal does not turn, either slowly or suddenly, from a dog into a cat. But when we are comparing Christians in general with non-Christians in general, we are usually not thinking about real people whom we know at all, but only about two vague ideas which we have got from novels and newspapers. If you want to compare the bad Christian and the good atheist, you must think about two real specimens whom you have actually met. Unless we come down to brass tacks in that way, we shall only be wasting time. Number two, suppose we have come down to brass tacks and are now talking not about an imaginary Christian and an imaginary non-Christian, but about two real people in our own neighborhood. Even then, we must be careful to ask the right question. If Christianity is true, then it ought to follow, A, that any Christian will be nicer than the same person would be if he were not a Christian, B, that any man who becomes a Christian will be nicer than he was before, just in the same way if the advertisements of White Smiles toothpaste are true, it ought to follow. A, that anyone who uses it will have better teeth than the same person would have if he did not use it. B, that if anyone begins to use it, his teeth will improve. But to point out that I, who use White Smiles, and also have inherited bad teeth from both my parents, have not got as fine a set as some healthy young negro who never used any toothpaste at all, does not by itself prove that the advertisements are untrue. Christian Miss Bates may have an unkinder tongue than unbelieving Dick Firkin. That by itself does not tell us whether Christianity works. The question is what Ms. Bates' tongue would be like if she were not a Christian, and what Dick's would be like if he became one. Miss Bates and Dick, as a result of natural causes and early upbringing, have certain temperaments. Christianity professes to put both temperaments under new management if they will allow it to do so. What you have a right to ask is whether that management, if allowed to take over, improves the concern. Everyone knows that what it what is being managed in Dick Firkin's case is much nicer than what is being managed in Ms. Bates. That is not the point. To judge the management of a factory, you must consider not only the output, but the plant. Considering the plant at factory A, it may be a wonder that it turns out anything at all. Considering the first class outfit at factory B, its output, though high, may be a great deal lower than it ought to be. No doubt, the good manager at factory A is going to put in new machinery as soon as he can, but that takes time. In the meantime, low output does not prove that he is a failure. Number three, and now let us go a little deeper. The manager is going to put in new machinery. Before Christ has finished with Miss Bates, she is going to be very nice indeed. But if we left it at that, it would sound as though Christ's only aim was to pull Miss Bates up to the same level on which Dick had been all along. We've been talking, in fact, as if Dick were all right, as if Christianity was something nasty people needed and nice ones could afford to do without, and as if niceness was all that God demanded. But this would be a fatal mistake. The truth is that, in God's eyes, Dick Firkin needs saving every bit as much as Miss Bates. In one sense, I will explain what sense in a moment, niceness hardly comes into the question. You cannot expect God to look at Dick's placid temper and friendly disposition exactly as we do. They result from natural causes which God himself creates. Being merely temperamental, they will all disappear if Dick's digestion alters. The niceness, in fact, is God's gift to Dick, not Dick's gift to God. In the same way, God has allowed natural causes working in a world spoiled by centuries of sin to produce and misbate the narrow-minded and jangled nerves which account for most of her nastiness. He intends, in his own good time, to set that part of her right. But that is not, for God, the critical part of the business. It presents no difficulties. It is not what He is anxious about. What He is watching and waiting and working for is something that is not easy even for God, because, from the nature of the case, even He cannot produce it by a mere act of power. He is waiting and watching for it both in Miss Bates and in Dick Firkin. It is something they can freely give Him or freely refuse to Him. Will they or will they not turn to Him and thus fulfill the only purpose for which they were created? Their free will is trembling inside them like the needle of a compass. But this is a needle that they can choose. It can point to its true north, but it need not. Will the needle swing round and settle and point to God? He can help it to do so. He cannot force it. He cannot, so to speak, put out his own hand and pull it into the right position. For then, it would not be free will anymore. Will it point north? That is the question on which all hangs. Will Miss Bates and Dick offer their natures to God? The question whether their natures they offered or withhold are, at the moment, nice or nasty ones is of secondary importance. God can see to that part of the problem. Do not misunderstand me. Of course God regards a nasty nature as a bad and deplorable thing. And, of course, He regards a nice nature as a good thing, good like bread or sunshine or water. But these are the good things which He gives and we receive. He created Dick's sound nerves and good digestion, and there is plenty more where that came from. It costs God nothing, so far as we know, to create nice things, but to convert rebellious wills cost his crucifixion. And because they are wills, they can, in nice people just as much as nasty ones, refuse his request. And then, because they because that niceness in Dick was merely part of nature, it will all go to pieces in the end. Nature herself will all pass away. Natural causes come together in Dick to make a pleasant psychological pattern. just as they come together in a sunset to make a pleasant pattern of colors. Presently, for that is how nature works, they will fall apart again, and the pattern, in both cases, will disappear. Dick has had the chance to turn, or rather, to allow God to turn, that momentary pattern into the beauty of an eternal spirit, and he has not taken it. There is a paradox here. As long as Dick does not turn to God, he thinks his niceness is his own, and just as long as he thinks that, it is not his own. It is when Dick realizes that his niceness is not his own, but a gift from God, and when he offers it back to God, it is just then that it begins to really be his own. For now Dick is beginning to take a share in his own creation. The only things we can keep are the things we freely give to God. What we try to keep for ourselves is just what we are sure to lose. We must, therefore, Not be surprised if we find among the Christians some people who are still nasty. There is even, when you come to think of it, over a reason why nasty people might be expected to turn to Christ in greater numbers than nice ones. That was what people objected to about Christ during His life on earth. He seemed to attract such awful people. That is what people still object to and always will. Do you not see why? Christ said, blessed are the poor, and how hard it is for the rich to enter into the kingdom. And no doubt, he primarily meant the economically rich and economically poor. But do not his words also apply to another kind of riches and poverty? One of the dangers of having a lot of money is that you may be quite satisfied with the kinds of happiness money can give and so fail to realize your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing checks, you may forget that you are, at every moment, totally dependent on God. Now, quite plainly, natural gifts carry with them a similar danger. If you have sound nerves and intelligence and health and popularity and a good upbringing, you are likely to be quite satisfied with your character as it is. Why drag God into this, you may ask? A certain level of good conduct comes fairly easily to you. You are not one of those wretched creatures who are always being tripped up by sex or dipsomania or nervousness or bad temper. Everyone says you are a nice chap and, between ourselves, you agree with them. You are quite likely to believe that all this niceness is your own doing and you may easily not feel the need for any better kind of goodness. Often people who have all these natural kinds of goodness cannot be brought to recognize their need for Christ at all until, one day, the natural goodness lets them down and their self-satisfaction is shattered. In other words, it is hard for those who are rich in this sense to enter the kingdom. It is very different for the nasty people, the little, low, timid, warped, thin-blooded, lonely people, or the passionate, sensual, unbalanced people. If they make any attempt at goodness at all, they learn in double quick time that they need help. It is Christ or nothing for them. It is taking up the cross and following, or else despair. They are the lost sheep. He came specially to find them. They are, in one very real and terrible sense, the poor. He blessed them. They are the awful set He goes about with. And of course, the Pharisees say still, as they said from the first, if there were anything in Christianity, those people would not be Christians. There is either a warning or an encouragement here for every one of us. If you are a nice person, if virtue comes easily to you, beware. Much is expected from those to whom much is given. If you mistake for your own merits what are really God's gifts to you through nature, and if you are contented with simply being nice, you are still a rebel. And all those gifts will only make your fall more terrible, your corruption more complicated, your bad example more disastrous. The devil was an archangel once. His natural gifts were as far above yours as yours are above those of a chimpanzee. If you are a poor creature, poisoned by a wretched upbringing, in some house full of vulgar jealousies and senseless quarrels, saddled by no choice of your own, with some loathsome sexual perversion, nagged day in and out by an inferiority complex that makes you snap at your best friends. Do not despair. He knows all about it. You are one of the poor whom he blessed. He knows what a wretched machine you are trying to drive. Keep on. Do what you can. One day, perhaps in another world, but perhaps far sooner than that, he will fling it on the scrap heap and give you a new one. And then you may astonish us all, not least yourself, for you have learned your driving in a hard school. Some of the last will be first and some of the first will be last. Niceness, wholesome, integrated, personality is an excellent thing. We must try, by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in our power to produce a world where as many people as possible grow up nice, just as we try as we must try to produce a world where all have plenty to eat, but we must not suppose that even if we succeed in making everyone nice, we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world, and might even be more difficult to save. For mere improvement is not redemption. Though redemption always improves people, even here and now, and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons not simply to produce better men of this old kind, but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better, but like turning a horse into a winged creature. Of course, once it has got its wings, it will soar over fences which could never have been jumped, and thus beat the natural horse at its own game. But there may be a period while the wings are just beginning to grow, when it cannot do so, and at that stage, the lumps on the shoulders, no one could tell by looking at them that they were going to be wings, may even give it an awkward appearance. But perhaps we have already spent too long on this question. If what you want is an argument against Christianity, and I well remember how eagerly I looked for such arguments when I began to be afraid it was true, you can easily find some stupid and unsatisfactory Christian and say, so there's your boasted new man. Give me the old kind. But if once you have begun to see that Christianity is on other grounds probable, you will know in your heart that this is only evading the issue. What can you ever really know of other people's souls, of their temptations, their opportunities, their struggles? One soul in the whole creation you do know, and it is the only one whose fate is placed in your hands. If there is a God, you are, in a sense, alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next-door neighbors or memories of what you have read in books. What will all that matter and hearsay count? Will you even be able to remember it? When the anesthetic fog, which we call nature, the real world fades away, and the presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and unavoidable." That was the end of chapter 32. We'll be starting in on chapter 33. Chapter 33, Our final chapter is called The New Men, which I love because, you know, the last one had that question in the title, which we just went through. The question in the title of the last one was nice people or new men. And now he's giving us our final chapter called The New Men. So we have been answered sort of. And this final chapter will really resound with us. We are the new people created in Christ. In this last chapter, excuse me, in the last chapter, I compared Christ's work of making new men to the process of turning a horse into a winged creature. I used that extreme example in order to emphasize the point that it is not mere improvement, but transformation. The nearest parallel to it in the world of nature is to be found in the remarkable transformations we can make in insects by applying certain rays to them. Some people think this is how evolution worked. The alterations in creatures on which it all depends may have been produced by rays coming from outer space. Of course, once the alterations are there, what they call natural selection gets to work on them, i.e., the useful alterations survive and the other ones weeded out. Perhaps a modern man can understand the Christian idea best if he takes it in connection with evolution. Everyone knows, excuse me, everyone now knows about evolution, though of course some educated people disbelieve it. Everyone has been told that man has evolved from lower types of life. Consequently, people often wonder, what is the next step? When is the thing beyond man going to appear? Imaginative writers try, sometimes, to picture this next step, the Superman, as they call him, but they usually only succeed in picturing someone a good deal nastier than man, as we know him. and then try to make up for that by sticking on extra legs or arms. But supposing the next step was to be something even more different from the earlier steps than they ever dreamed of. And is it not very likely it would be? Thousands of centuries ago, huge, very heavily armored creatures were evolved. If anyone had, at that time, been watching the course of evolution, he would probably have expected that it was going to go on to heavier and heavier armor, but he would have been wrong. The future had a card up its sleeve, which nothing at that time would have led him to expect. It was going to spring on him little naked unarmored animals which had better brains, and with those brains, they were going to master the whole planet. They were not merely going to have more power than the prehistoric monsters, they were going to have a new kind of power. The next step was not only going to be different, but different with a new kind of difference. The stream of evolution was not going to flow on in the direction in which he saw it flowing. It was, in fact, going to take a sharp bend. Now, it seems to me that most of the popular guesses at the next step are making just the same sort of mistake. People see, or at any rate, they think they see, Men developing great brains and getting greater mastery over nature. And because they think the stream is flowing in that direction, they imagine it will go on flowing in that direction. But I cannot help thinking that the next step will be really new. It will go off in a direction you could never have dreamed of. it would hardly be worth calling a new step unless it did. I should expect not merely difference, but a new kind of difference. I should expect not merely change, but a new method of producing the change. Or, to make an Irish bull, I should expect the next stage in evolution not to be a stage in evolution at all. should expect that evolution itself, as a method of producing change, will be superseded. And finally, I should not be surprised if, when the things happened, very few people noticed that it was happening. Now, if you care to talk in those terms, The Christian view is precisely that next step has already appeared, and it is really new. It is not a change from brainy men to brainier men. It is a change that goes off in a totally different direction, a change from being creatures of God to being sons of God. The first instance appeared in Palestine 2,000 years ago. In a sense, the change is not evolution at all, because it is not something arising out of the natural process of events, but something coming into nature from outside. But that is what I should expect. We arrived at our idea of evolution from studying the past. If there were real novelties in store, then of course our idea based on the past will not really cover them. And, in fact, this new step differs from all previous ones not only in coming from outside nature, but in several other ways as well. 1. It is not carried on by sexual reproduction. Need we be surprised at that? There was a time before sex had appeared. Development used to go on by different methods. Consequently, we might have expected that there would come a time when sex disappeared, or else, which is what is actually happening, a time when sex, though it continued to exist, ceased to be the main channel of a development. 2. At the earlier stages, living organisms have had either no choice or very little choice about taking the new step. Progress was, in the main, something that happened to them, not something that they did. But the new step, the step from being creatures to being sons, is voluntary, at least voluntary in one sense. It is not voluntary in the sense that we, of ourselves could have chosen to take it or could even have imagined it. But it is voluntary in the sense that when it is offered to us, we can refuse it. We can, if we please, shrink back. We can dig in our heels and let the new humanity go on without us. 3. I have called Christ the first instance of the new man, but of course he is something much more than that. He is not merely a new man, one specimen of the species, but THE new man. He is the origin and center and life of all the new men. He came into the created universe of his own will, bringing with him the Zoe, the new life. I mean new to us, of course. In its own place, Zoe has existed forever and ever. And he transmits it, not by heredity, but by what I have called good infection. Everyone who gets it, gets it by personal contact with him. Other men become new, by being in him. Number four. This step is taken at a different speed from the previous ones. Compared with the development of man on this planet, the diffusion of Christianity over the human race seems to go like a flash of lightning. For 2,000 years is almost nothing in the history of the universe. Never forget that we are still we are all still the early Christians. The present wicked and wasteful divisions between us are, let us hope, a disease of infancy. We are still teething. The outer world, no doubt, thinks just the opposite. It thinks we are dying of old age. But it has thought that very often before. Again and again it has thought Christianity was dying, dying by persecutions from without and corruptions from within, by the rise of Mohammedanism, the rise of the physical sciences, the rise of great anti-Christian revolutionary movements. But every time the world has been disappointed. Its first disappointment was over the crucifixion. The man came to life again. in a sense, and I quite realize how frightfully unfair it must seem to them, that has been happening ever since. They keep on killing the thing that he started, and each time, just as they are patting down the earth on its grave, they suddenly hear that it is still alive and has ever broken out in some new place. No wonder they hate us. Number five, the stakes are higher. By falling back at the earlier steps, a creature lost, at the worst, its few years of life on this earth. Very often, it did not lose even that. By falling back at this step, we lose a prize which is, in the strictest sense of the word, infinite. For now the critical moment has arrived. Century by century, God has guided nature up to that point of producing creatures which can, if they will, be taken right out of nature, turned into gods. Will they allow themselves to be taken? In a way, it is like the crisis of birth. Until we rise and follow Christ, we are still parts of nature, still in the womb of our great mother. Her pregnancy has been long and painful and anxious. But it has reached its climax. The great moment has come. Everything is ready. The doctor has arrived. Will the birth go off all right? But of course it differs from an ordinary birth in one important respect. In an ordinary birth, the baby has not much choice. Here it has. I wonder what an Ordinary baby would do, if it had the choice. It might prefer to stay in the dark and warmth and safety of the womb. For, of course, it would think the womb meant safety. That would be just where it was wrong. For if it stays there, it will die. On this view, the thing has happened. The new step has been taken and is being taken. Already the new men are dotted here and there, all over the earth. Some, as I have admitted, are still hardly recognizable, but others can be recognized. Every now and then, one meets them. Their very voices and faces are different from ours, stronger, quieter, happier, more radiant. They begin where most of us leave off. They are, I say, recognizable. But you must know what to look for. They will not be very like the idea of religious people, which you have formed from your general reading. They do not draw attention to themselves. You tend to think that you are being kind to them when they are really being kind to you. They love you more than other men do, but they need you less. We must get over wanting to be needed in some goodish people, especially women. That is the hardest of all temptations to resist. They will usually seem to have a lot of time. You will wonder where it comes from. When you have recognized one of them, you will recognize the next one much more easily, and I strongly suspect, but how should I know, that they recognize one another immediately and infallibly, across every barrier of color, sex, class, age, and even of creeds. In that way, to become holy is rather like joining a secret society. To put it at the very lowest, it must be great fun. but you must not imagine that the new men are, in the ordinary sense, all alike. A good deal of what I've been saying in this last book might make you suppose that there was bound to be so. To become new men means losing what we now call ourselves. Out of ourselves into Christ we must go. His will is to become ours, and we are to think His thoughts, to have the mind of Christ, as the Bible says. And if Christ is one, and if He is thus to be in us all, shall we not be exactly the same? It certainly sounds like it, but in fact, it is not so. It is difficult here to get a good illustration because, of course, no other two things are related to each other, just as the creator is related to one of his creatures. But I will try two very imperfect illustrations, which may give a hint of the truth. Imagine a lot of people who have always lived in the dark. You come and try to describe to them what light is like. You might tell them that if they come into the light, that same light would fall on them all, and they would all reflect it, and thus become what we call visible. It is not quite possible that they would imagine that, since they were all receiving the same light, and all reacting to it in the same way, i.e. all reflecting it. They would all look alike. Whereas you and I, no. that the light will, in fact, bring out or show up how different they are. Or again, suppose a person who knew nothing about salt. You give him a pinch to taste and he experiences a particular strong, sharp taste. You then tell him, in your country, people use salt in all their cookery. Might he not reply, in that case I suppose all your dishes taste exactly the same, because the taste of that stuff you have just given me is so strong that it will kill the taste of everything else. But you and I know that the real effect of salt is exactly the opposite. So far from killing the taste of the egg and the tripe and the cabbage, it actually brings it out. They do not show their real taste till you have added the salt. Of course, as I warned you, this is not really a very good illustration because you can, after all, kill the other taste by putting in too much salt, whereas you cannot kill the taste of a human personality by putting in too much Christ. I am doing the best I can. It is something like that with Christ and us. The more we get, What we now call ourselves out of the way and let Him take us over the more truly ourselves we become. There is so much of Him that millions and millions of little Christs, all different, will still be too few to express Him fully. He made them all. He invented, as an author invents characters in a novel, all the different men that you and I were intended to be. In that sense, our real selves are all waiting for us in Him. It is no good trying to be myself without Him. The more I resist Him and try to live on my own, the more I become dominated by my own heredity. and upbringing, and surrounding natural desires. In fact, what I so proudly call MYSELF becomes merely the meeting place for trains of events which I never started and which I cannot stop. What I call MY WISHES become merely the desires thrown up by my physical organism, or pumped into me by other men's thoughts, or even suggested to me by devils. eggs and alcohol and a good night's sleep will be the real origins of what I flatter myself by regarding as my own highly personal and discriminating decision to make love to the girl opposite to me in the railway carriage. Propaganda will be the real origin of what I regard as my own personal political ideas. I am not, in my natural state, nearly so much of a person as I like to believe. Most of what I call me can be very easily explained. It is when I turn to Christ, when I give myself up to His personality, that I first begin to have a real personality of my own. At the beginning, I said there were personalities in God. I will go further now. There are no real personalities anywhere else. Until you have given up your self to Him, you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most natural men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously or monotonously. Alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been, how gloriously different are the saints. But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away blindly, so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality, but you must not go to him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about, you are not going to him at all. The very first step is to try and forget about the self altogether. Your real new self, which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is his, will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him. Does that sound strange? The same principle holds, you know, for more everyday matters. Even in social life, you will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you're making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original. Whereas, if you simply try to tell the truth, without caring two pence how often it has been told before, you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it. The principle runs through all life, from top to bottom. Give up yourself, and you will find your real self. Lose your life and you will save it. Submit to death, death of your ambitions and favorite wishes, every day and death of your whole body in the end. Submit with every fiber of your being and you will find eternal life. Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in. The End That concludes C.S. Lewis' Mere Christianity. I hope this has been a really good adventure for you to be able to go on getting to listen again to what was initially put forth by C.S. Lewis over the radio, bringing help and hope to thousands if not millions of people in a very great time of need. And I think we often have those times of need in all of our lifetimes. So I hope that you've really enjoyed C.S. Lewis's Mere Christianity. I would say he wants you to struggle with the different things and to argue with him through them and dig into the Bible and see if he's right or not. But I find by and large that mere Christianity really helps me to understand what the Bible is saying as I read and reread through it, and also to apply it to my life, because there's not much point in just having some head knowledge if it doesn't sink that 18 inches down into my heart. So, I hope you're blessed, and have a great life.