Daily Thoughts from C.S. Lewis, part deux

So, as part of the new and exciting me, I’ve decided that I need to start reading more books. Well, this and that I need to finish the books that I start. Currently, I have around… oh… 392 books that have bookmarks somewhere within the first quarter of them.

I’ve finished 3 good books since I’ve been out here in Rhode Island, and I’m currently working on finishing C.S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity. Which reminds me, Mike, I’m still waiting for your review…. =;)

But here’s some really good blips from the last week’s worth of chapters I’ve read….

Warning: Open minds required below….

As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

For Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, or contentment, or even common sense.

If anyone would like to acquire humility, I can, I think, tell him the first step. The first step is to realise that one is proud.

The rule for all of us is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you ‘love’ your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you loved someone, you will presently come to love them.

The worldy man treats certain people kindly because he ‘likes’ them: the Christian, trying to treat every one kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on–including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning.

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance.

… people are often worried. They are told they ought to love God. They cannot find any such feeling in themselves. What are they to do? The answer is the same as before. Act as if you did. Do not sit trying to manufacture feelings. Ask yourself, ‘If I were sure that I loved God, what would I do?’ When you have found the answer, go and do it.

The other set were accused of saying ‘Faith is all that matters. Consequently, if you have faith, it doesn’t matter what you do. Sin away, my lad, and have a good time and Christ will see that it makes no difference in the end.’ The answer to that nonsense is that, if what you call your ‘Faith’ in Christ does not involve taking the slightest noticice of what He says, then it is not Faith at all–not faith or trust in Him, but only intellectual acceptance of some theory about Him.

Even though C.S. Lewis’s theological books are a little more terse, intellectual, and harder to plod through then his more famous Chronicles of Narnia, I think it is well worth your while. He has a wonderful, logical way of speaking through his words.

Go read a book! =;)