On Skeptics

"I do not imagine, or expect, that I can win over, at once, to Christianity, the minds of sceptical workingmen, who may be listening to me.

 I know too well, by personal experience, how hard it is to part with sceptical convictions—how difficult it is to bring a mind, which has become strongly warped in the direction of unbelief, to enter upon a determined, steady, and persevering consideration of the Christian Evidences. And without this—without an earnest and devoted study of Christian Evidences—no thinking skeptic (for I am not addressing vulgar scoffers) can ever become a real Christian.

"I seek no flighty converts from your ranks—no sudden passing over to our side from yours, of some hot, excitable partisan, who is incapable of thinking. I seek to lead you to accept what I believe to be Truth, by inducing you to practise the daily reflection, the steady conning over and over again of each item of the Christian Evidences, which effectually cured my doubts, and rendered me a settled and grateful believer. I would not lift up my finger, or stir a straw, to make a sudden and spasmodic conversion of any one of you, which would leave you helpless in your new belief, and incapable of giving a reason of the hope within you. Such a convert would be a very useless one. I want to enlist real soldiers for my Master."

—Thomas Cooper

The Verity of Christ’s Resurrection from the Dead (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1875), pp. 131-32.

On Pleasure and "The Enemy"

On pleasure

[The demon Screwtape writes:] [God, the “Enemy,” is] a hedonist at heart. All those fasts and vigils and stakes and crosses are only a facade. Or only like foam on the sea shore. Out at sea, out in His sea, there is pleasure, and more pleasure. He makes no secret of it; at His right hand are “pleasures for evermore.” Ugh! Don’t think He has the least inkling of that high and austere mystery to which we rise in the Miserific Vision. He’s vulgar, Wormwood. He has a bourgeois mind. He has filled His world full of pleasures. There are things for humans to do all day long without His minding in the least—sleeping, washing, eating, drinking, making love, playing, praying, working. Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us. We fight under cruel disadvantages. Nothing is naturally on our side.

From The Screwtape Letters

This Isn't How It's Suppose To Be

Prayer, in this sense, is rebelling against the status quo of a world going awry. It is refusing to come to terms with an unjust, dark and evil world, as if it were all we were meant to have, as if there was no one or nothing that could change it; prayer is standing in the light of a God who comes in flesh to say otherwise. But in so doing, prayer remembers not only that the world as we find it can be changed and that it should be changed. The significant piece for the abolitionist to remember is that while I am not going to be the one who brings an end to the world’s suffering, there is indeed one who is. It is at his feet, even in our weariness, where we want to sit.

Jesus instructed his followers to pray, “Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (Matthew 6:9,10). In prayer we stand in rebellion against a world that is not hallowing the name of God, a world not looking for signs of the kingdom, a world wholly uninterested in doing the will of anyone but self. The nature of prayer as Christ taught us is a persistent posture toward God as sovereign, an undeterred vision of what the kingdom is, can, and ought to be, a vision of what God intended for all of creation.

As the psalmist has prayed:
Hear my voice when I call, O LORD;
be merciful to me and answer me.
My heart says of you, ‘Seek his face!’
Your face, LORD, I will seek.

The Christian seeks the face of God not to escape reality but to find it, to stand before the sovereign in his kingdom with all that is here and now—with pain and sickness, with goodness and mercy, with all that is unjust and corrupt, and all that is right and beautiful. In prayer, the Christian stands with the one who so loved creation that he joined us within it—in every painful sense of what that would mean for him. The rebellious vision of human flourishing was the very prayer he fought to embody for us—even unto the last rebellion of death itself. Here and now and also coming, on earth as it is in heaven, his is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever.

On Love and Feelings

What we call ‘being in love’ is a glorious state, and, in several ways, good for us. It helps to make us generous and courageous, it opens our eyes not only to the beauty of the beloved but to all beauty, and it sub- ordinates (especially at first) our merely animal sexuality; in that sense, love is the great conqueror of lust. No one in his senses would deny that being in love is far better than either common sensuality or cold self-centredness. But, as I said before, ‘the most dangerous thing you can do is to take any one impulse of our own nature and set it up as the thing you ought to follow at all costs’. Being in love is a good thing, but it is not the best thing. There are many things below it, but there are also things above it. You cannot make it the basis of a whole life. It is a noble feeling, but it is still a feeling. Now no feeling can be relied on to last in its full intensity, or even to last at all. Knowledge can last, principles can last, habits can last; but feelings come and go. And in fact, whatever people say, the state called ‘being in love’ usually does not last.

If the old fairy-tale ending ‘They lived happily ever after’ is taken to mean ‘They felt for the next fifty years exactly as they felt the day before they were married’, then it says what probably never was nor ever would be true, and would be highly undesirable if it were. Who could bear to live in that excitement for even five years? What would become of your work, your appetite, your sleep, your friendships? But, of course, ceasing to be ‘in love’ need not mean ceasing to love. Love in this second sense—love as distinct from ‘being in love’—is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other; as you love yourself even when you do not like yourself. They can retain this love even when each would easily, if they allowed themselves, be ‘in love’ with someone else. ‘Being in love’ first moved them to promise fidelity: this quieter love enables them to keep the promise. It is on this love that the engine of marriage is run: being in love was the explosion that started it.

From Mere Christianity