Everyone has warned me not to
tell you what I am going to tell you in this last book. They all say `the
ordinary reader does not want Theology; give him plain practical religion'. I
have rejected their advice. I do not think the ordinary reader is such a fool.
Theology means 'the science of God,' and I think any man who wants to think
about God at all would like to have the clearest and most accurate ideas about
Him which are available. You are not children: why should you be treated like
children?
In a way I quite understand why
some people are put off by Theology. I remember once when I had been giving a
talk to the R.A.F., an old, hard-bitten officer got up and said, `I've no use
for all that stuff. But, mind you, I'm a religious man too. I know there's a
God. I've felt Him out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery.
And that's just why I don't believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas
about Him. To anyone who's met the real thing they all seem so petty and
pedantic and unreal !'
Now in a sense I quite agreed
with that man. I think he had probably had a real experience of God in the
desert. And when he turned from that experience to the Christian creeds, I
think he really was turning from something real to something less real. In the
same way, if a man has once looked at the Atlantic from the beach, and then
goes and looks at a map of the Atlantic, he also will be turning from something
real to something less real: turning from real waves to a bit of coloured
paper. But here comes the point. The map is admittedly only coloured paper, but
there are two things you have to remember about it. In the first place, it is
based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found out by sailing the
real Atlantic. In that way it has behind it masses of experience just as real
as the one you could have from the beach; only, while yours would be a single
glimpse, the map fits all those different experiences together. In the second
place, if you want to go anywhere, the map is absolutely necessary. As long as
you are content with walks on the beach, your own glimpses are far more fun
than looking at a map. But the map is going to be more use than walks on the
beach if you want to get to America.
Now, Theology is like the map.
Merely learning and thinking about the Christian doctrines, if you stop there,
is less real and less exciting than the sort of thing my friend got in the
desert. Doctrines are not God: they are only a kind of map. But that map is
based on the experience of hundreds of people who really were in touch with
God-experiences compared with which any thrills or pious feelings you and I are
likely to get on our own are very elementary and very confused. And secondly,
if you want to get any further, you must use the map. You see, what happened to
that man in the desert may have been real, and was certainly exciting, but
nothing comes of it. It leads nowhere. There is nothing to do about it. In
fact, that is just why a vague religion-all about feeling God in nature, and so
on-is so attractive. It is all thrills and no work; like watching the waves
from the beach. But you will not get to Newfoundland by studying the Atlantic
that way, and you will not get eternal life by simply feeling the presence of
God in flowers or music. Neither will you get anywhere by looking at maps
without going to sea. Nor will you be very safe if you go to sea without a map.
In other words, Theology is
practical: especially now. In the old days, when there was less education and
discussion, perhaps it was possible to get on with a very few simple ideas
about God. But it is not so now. Everyone reads, everyone hears things
discussed. Consequently, if you do not listen to Theology, that will not mean
that you have no ideas about God. It will mean that you have a lot of wrong
ones - bad, muddled, out-of-date ideas. For a great many of the ideas about God
which are trotted out as novelties to-day are simply the ones which real
Theologians tried centuries ago and rejected. To believe in the popular
religion of modern England is retrogression - like believing the earth is flat.
For when you get down to it, is
not the popular idea of Christianity simply this: that Jesus Christ was a great
moral teacher and that if only we took His advice we might be able to establish
a better social order and avoid another war? Now, mind you, that is quite true.
But it tells you much less than the whole truth about Christianity and it has
no practical importance at all.
It is quite true that if we took
Christ's advice we should soon be living in a happier world. You need not even
go as far as Christ. If we did all that Plato or Aristotle or Confucius told
us, we should get on a great deal better than we do. And so what: We never have
followed the advice of the great teachers. Why are we likely to begin now? Why
are we more likely to follow Christ than any of the others? Because He is the
best moral teacher? But that makes it even less likely that we shall follow Him.
If we cannot take the elementary lessons, is it likely we are going to take the
most advanced one? If Christianity only means one more bit of good advice, then
Christianity is of no importance. There has been no lack of good advice for the
last four thousand years. A bit more makes no difference.
But as soon as you look at any
real Christian writings, you find that they are talking about something quite
different from this popular religion. They say that Christ is the Son of God
(whatever that means). They say that those who give Him their confidence can
also become Sons of God (whatever that means). They say that His death saved us
from our sins (whatever that means).
There is no good complaining that
these statements are difficult. Christianity claims to be telling us about
another world, about something behind the world we can touch and hear and see.
You may think the claim false; but if it were true, what it tells us would be
bound to be difficult-at least as difficult as modern Physics, and for the same
reason.
Now the point in Christianity
which gives us the greatest shock is the statement that by attaching ourselves
to Christ, we can `become Sons of God'. One asks `Aren't we Sons of God
already? Surely the fatherhood of God is one of the main Christian ideas?'
Well, in a certain sense, no doubt we are sons of God already. I mean, God has
brought us into existence and loves us and looks after us, and in that way is
like a father. But when the Bible talks of our `becoming' Sons of God,
obviously it must mean something different. And that brings us up against the
very centre of Theology.
One of the creeds says that
Christ is the Son of God 'begotten, not created'; and it adds `begotten by his
Father before all worlds'. Will you please get it quite clear that this has
.nothing to do with the fact that when Christ was born on earth as a man, that
man was the son of a virgin? We are not now thinking about the Virgin Birth. We
are thinking about something that happened before Nature was created at all,
before time began. `Before all worlds' Christ is begotten, not created. What
does it mean?
We don't use the words begetting
or begotten much in modern English, but everyone still knows what they mean. To
beget is to become the father of: to create is to make. And the difference is
this. When you beget, you beget something of the same kind as yourself. A man
begets human babies, a beaver begets little beavers and a bird begets eggs
which turn into little birds. But when you make, you make something of a
different kind from yourself. A bird makes a nest, a beaver builds a dam, a man
makes a wireless set-or he may make something more like himself than a wireless
set : say, a statue. If he is a clever enough carver he may make a statue which
is very like a man indeed. But, of course, it is not a real man; it only looks
like one. It cannot breathe or think. It is not alive.
Now that is the first thing to
get clear. What God begets is God; just as what man begets is man. What God
creates is not God; just as what man makes is not man. That is why men are not
Sons of God in the sense that Christ is. They may be like God in certain ways,
but they are not things of the same kind. They are more like statues or
pictures of God.
A statue has the shape of a man
but is not alive. In the same way, man has (in a sense I am going to explain)
the `shape' or likeness of God, but he has not got the kind of life God has.
Let us take the first point (man's resemblance to God) first. Everything God
has made has some likeness to Himself. Space is like Him in its hugeness: not
that the greatness of space is the same kind of greatness as God's, but it is a
sort of symbol of it, or a translation of it into non-spiritual terms. Matter
is like God in having energy: though, again, of course, physical energy is a
different kind of thing from the power of God. The vegetable world is like Him
because it is alive, and He is the 'living God'. But life, in this biological
sense, is not the same as the life there is in God: it is only a kind of symbol
or shadow of it. When we come on to the animals, we find other kinds of
resemblance in addition to biological life. The intense activity and fertility
of the insects, for example, is a first dim resemblance to the unceasing
activity and the creativeness of God. In the higher mammals we get the
beginnings of instinctive affection. That is not the same thing as the love
that exists in God: but it is like it - rather in the way that a picture drawn
on a flat piece of paper can nevertheless be `like' a landscape. When we come
to man, the highest of the animals, we get the completest resemblance to God
which we know of. (There may be creatures in other worlds who are more like God
than man is, but we do not know about them.) Man not only lives, but loves and
reasons: biological life reaches its highest known level in him.
But what man, in his natural
condition, has not got, is Spiritual life the higher and different sort of life
that exists in God. We use the same word life for both: but if you thought that
both must therefore be the same sort of thing, that would be like thinking that
the 'greatness' of space and the `greatness' of God were the same sort of
greatness. In reality, the difference between Biological life and Spiritual
life is so important that I am going to give them two distinct names. The
Biological sort which comes to us through Nature, and which (like everything
else in Nature) is always tending to run down and decay so that it can only be
kept up by incessant subsidies from Nature in the form of air, water, food,
etc., is Bios. The Spiritual life which is in God from all eternity, and which
made the whole natural universe, is Zoe. Bios has, to be sure, a certain
shadowy or symbolic resemblance to Zoe: but only the sort of resemblance there
is between a photo and a place, or a statue and a man. A man who changed from
having Bios to having Zoe would have gone through as big a change as a statue
which changed from being a carved stone to being a real man.
And that is precisely what
Christianity is about. This world is a great sculptor's shop. We are the
statues and there is a rumour going round the shop that some of us are some day
going to come to life.
The last chapter was about the
difference between begetting and making. A man begets a child, but he only
makes a statue. God begets Christ but He only makes men. But by saying that, I
have illustrated only one point about God, namely, that what God the Father
begets is God, something of the same kind as Himself. In that way it is like a
human father begetting a human son. But not quite like it. So I must try to
explain a little more.
A good many people nowadays say,
`I believe in a God, but not in a personal God.' They feel that the mysterious
something which is behind all other things must be more than a person. Now the
Christians quite agree. But the Christians are the only people who offer any
idea of what a being that is beyond personality could be like. All the other
people, though they say that God is beyond personality, really think of Him as
something impersonal: that is, as something less than personal. If you are
looking for something super-personal, something more than a person, then it is
not a question of choosing between the Christian idea and the other ideas. The Christian
idea is the only one on the market.
Again, some people think that
after this life, or perhaps after several lives, human souls will be 'absorbed'
into God. But when they try to explain what they mean, they seem to be thinking
of our being absorbed into God as one material thing is absorbed into another.
They say it is like a drop of water slipping into the sea. But of course that
is the end of the drop. If that is what happens to us, then being absorbed is
the same as ceasing to exist. It is only the Christians who have any idea of
how human souls can be taken into the life of God and yet remain themselves-in
face, be very much more themselves than they were before.
I warned you that Theology is
practical. The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the
life of God. Wrong ideas about what that life is will make it harder. And now,
for a few minutes, I must ask you to follow rather carefully.
You know that in space you can
move in three ways - to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every
direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are
called the three Dimensions. Now notice :his. If you are using only one
dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two; you could
draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines.
Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we
call a solid body: say, a cube - a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a
cube is made up of six squares.
Do you see the point? A world of
one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still
get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional
world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other
words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not
leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have
them, but combined in new ways - in ways you could not imagine if you knew only
the simpler levels.
Now the Christian account of God
involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty
level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two
separate beings - just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one
square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the
Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined
in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God's
dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining
one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we
cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we
perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube.
But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for
the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of
something super-personal - something more than a person. It is something we
could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one
ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the
things we know already.
You may ask, 'if we cannot
imagine a three-personal Being, what is the good of talking about Him?' Well,
there isn't any good talking about Him. The thing that matters is being
actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin any time -
to-night, if you like.
What I mean is this. An ordinary
simple Christian kneels down to say his prayers. He is trying to get into touch
with God. But if he is a Christian he knows that what is prompting him to pray
is also God: God, so to speak, inside him. But he also knows that all his real
knowledge of God comes through Christ, the Man who was God - that Christ is
standing beside him, helping him to pray, praying for him. You see what is
happening. God is the thing to which he is praying the goal he is trying to
reach. God is also the thing inside him which is pushing him on - the motive
power. God is also the road or bridge along which he is being pushed to that
goal. So that the whole threefold life of the three-personal Being is actually
going on in that ordinary little bedroom where an ordinary man is saying his
prayers. The man is being caught up into the higher kinds of life - what I
called Zoe or spiritual life: he is being pulled into God, by God, while still
remaining himself.
And that is how Theology started.
People already knew about God in a vague way. Then came a man who claimed to be
God; and yet He was not the sort of man you could dismiss as a lunatic. He made
them believe Him. They met Him again after they had seen Him killed. And then,
after they had been formed into a little society or community, they found God
somehow inside them as well: directing them, making them able to do things they
could not do before. And when they worked it all out they found they had
arrived at the Christian definition of the three-personal God.
This definition is not something
we have made up; Theology is, in a sense, an experimental science. It is simple
religions that are the made-up ones. When I say it is an experimental science
'in a sense,' I mean that it is like the other experimental sciences in some
ways, but not in all. If you are a geologist studying rocks, you have to go and
find the rocks. They will not come to you, and if you go to them they cannot
run away. The initiative lies all on your side. They cannot either help or
hinder. But suppose you are a zoologist and want to take photos of wild animals
in their native haunts. That is a bit different from studying rocks. The wild
animals will not come to you: but they can run away from you. Unless you keep
very quiet, they will. There is beginning to be a tiny little trace of
initiative on their side.
Now a stage higher; suppose you
want to get to know a human person. If he is determined not to let you, you
will not get to know him. You have to win his confidence. In this case the
initiative is equally divided-it takes two to make a friendship.
When you come to knowing God, the
initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do
will enable you to find Him. And, in fact, He shows much more of Himself to
some people than to others - not because He has favourites, but because it is
impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are
in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favourites, cannot
be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.
You can put this another way by
saving that while in other sciences the instruments you use are things external
to yourself (things like microscopes and telescopes), the instrument through
which you see God is your whole self. And if a man's self is not kept clean and
bright, his glimpse of God will be blurred - like the Moon .seen through a
dirty telescope. That is why horrible nations have horrible religions: they
have been looking at God through a dirty lens.
God can show Himself as He really
is only to real men. And that means not simply to men who are individually
good, but to men who are united together in a body, loving one another, helping
one another, showing Him to one another. For that is what God meant humanity to
be like: like players in one band, or organs in one body.
Consequently, the one really
adequate instrument for learning about God is the whole Christian community,
waiting for Him together. Christian brotherhood is, so to speak, the technical
equipment for this science - the laboratory outfit. That is why all these
people who turn up every few years with some patent simplified religion of
their own as a substitute for the Christian tradition are really wasting time.
Like a man who has no instrument but an old pair of field glasses setting out
to put all the real astronomers right. He may be a clever chap - he may be
cleverer than some of the real astronomers, but he is not giving himself a
chance. And two years later everyone has forgotten all about him, but the real
science is still going on.
If Christianity was something we
were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not. We cannot
compete, in simplicity, with people who are inventing religions. How could we?
We are dealing with Fact. Of course anyone can be simple if he has no facts to
bother about.
I begin this chapter by asking
you to get a certain picture clear in your minds. Imagine two books lying on a
table one on top of the other. Obviously the bottom book is keeping the other one
up-supporting it. It is because of the underneath book that the top one is
resting, say, two inches from the surface of the table instead of touching the
table. Let us call the underneath book A and the top one B. The position of A
is causing the position of B. That is clear? Now let us imagine - it could not
really happen, of course, but it will do for an illustration -let us imagine
that both books have been in that position for ever and ever. In that case B's
position would always have been resulting from A's position. But all the same,
A's position would not have existed before B's position. In other words the
result does not come after the cause. Of course, results usually do: you eat
the cucumber first and have the indigestion afterwards. But it is not so with
all causes and results. You will see in a moment why I think this important.
I said a few pages back that God
is a Being which contains three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a
cube contains six squares while remaining one body. But as soon as I begin
trying to explain how these Persons are connected I have to use words which
make it sound as if one of them was there before the others. The First Person
is called the Father and the Second the Son. We say that the First begets or
produces the second; we call it begetting, not making, because what He produces
is of the same kind as Himself. In that way the word Father is the only word to
use. But unfortunately it suggests that He is there first-just as a human
father exists before his son. But that is not so. There is no before and after
about it. And that is why I think it important to make clear how one thing can
be the source, or cause, or origin, of another without being there before it.
The Son exists because the Father exists: but there never was a time before the
Father produced the Son.
Perhaps the best way to think of
it is this. I asked you just now to imagine those two books, and probably most
of you did. That is, you made an act of imagination and as a result you had a
mental picture. Quite obviously your act of imagining was the cause and the
mental picture the result. But that does not mean that you first did the
imagining and then got the picture. The moment you did it, the picture was
there. Your will was keeping the picture before you all the time. Yet that act
of will and the picture began at exactly the same moment and ended at the same
moment. If there were a Being who had always existed and had always been
imagining one thing, his act would always have been producing a mental picture;
but the picture would be just as eternal as the act.
In the same way we must think of
the Son always, so to speak, streaming forth from the Father, like light from a
lamp, or heat from a fire, or thoughts from a mind. He is the self-expression
of the Father-what the Father has to say. And there never was a time when He
was not saying it. But have you noticed what is happening? All these pictures
of light or heat are making it sound as if the Father and Son were two things
instead of two Persons. So that after all, the New Testament picture of a
Father and a Son turns out to be much more accurate than anything we try to
substitute for it. That is what always happens when you go away from the words
of the Bible. It is quite right to go away from them for a moment in order to
make some special point clear. But you must always go back. Naturally God knows
how to describe Himself much better than we know how to describe Him. He knows
that Father and Son is more like the relation between the First and Second
Persons than anything else we can think of. Much the most important thing to
know is that it is a relation of love. The Father delights in His Son; the Son
looks up to His Father.
Before going on, notice the
practical importance of this. All sorts of people are fond of repeating the
Christian statement that 'God is love.' But they seem not to notice that the
words 'God is love' have no real meaning unless God contains at least two
Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a
single person, then before the world was made, He was not love. Of course, what
these people mean when they say that God is love is often something quite
different: they really mean 'Love is God.' They really mean that our feelings
of love, however and wherever they arise, and whatever results they produce,
are to be treated with great respect. Perhaps they are: but that is something
quite different from what Christians mean by the statement 'God is love.' They
believe that the living, dynamic activity of love has been going on in God
forever and has created everything else.
And that, by the way, is perhaps
the most important difference between Christian and all other religions: that
in Christianity God is not a static thing - not even a person - but a dynamic,
pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not
think me irreverent, a kind of dance. The union between the Father and the Son
is such a live concrete thing that this union itself is also a Person. I know
this is almost inconceivable, but look at it thus. You know that among human
beings, when they get together in a family, or a club, or a trade union, people
talk about the 'spirit' of that family, or club, or trade union. They talk
about its 'spirit' because the individual members, when they are together. Do
really develop particular ways of talking and behaving which they would not
have if they were apart.' It is as if a sort of communal personality came into
existence. Of course, it is not a real person: it is only rather like a person.
But that is just one of the differences between God and us. What grows out of
the joint life of the Father and Son is a real Person, is in fact the Third of
the three Persons who are God.
This third Person is called, in
technical language, the Holy Ghost or the 'spirit' of God. Do not be worried or
surprised if you find it (or Him) rather vaguer or more shadowy in your mind
than the other two. I think there is a reason why that must be so. In the
Christian life you are not usually looking at Him. He is always acting through
you. If you think of the Father as something 'out there,' in front of you, and
of the Son as someone standing at your side, helping you to pray, trying to
turn you into another son, then you have to think of the third Person as
something inside you, or behind you. Perhaps some people might find it easier
to begin with the third Person and work backwards. God is love, and that love
works through men-especially through the whole community of Christians. But
this spirit of love is, from all eternity, a love going on between the Father
and the Son.
And now, what does it all matter?
It matters more than anything else in the world. The whole dance, or drama, or
pattern of this three-Personal life is to be played out in each one of us: or
(putting it the other way round) each one of us has got to enter that pattern,
take his place in that dance. There is no other way to the happiness for which
we were made. Good things as well as bad, you know, are caught by a kind of infection.
If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire: if you want to be wet you
must get into the water. If you want joy, power, peace, eternal life, you must
get close to, or even into, the thing that has them. They are not a sort of
prizes which God could, if He chose, just hand out to anyone. They are a great
fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very centre of reality. If you
are close to it, the spray will wet you: if you are not, you will remain dry.
Once a man is united to God, how could he not live forever? Once a man is
separated from God, what can he do but wither and die?
But how is he to be united to
God? How is it possible for us to be taken into the three-Personal life?
You remember what I said in
Chapter 24 about begetting and making. We are not begotten by God, we are only
made by Him: in our natural state we are not sons of God, only (so to speak)
statues. We have not got Zoe or spiritual life: only Bios or biological life
which is presently going to run down and die. Now the whole offer which
Christianity makes is this: that we can, if we let God have His way, come to
share in the life of Christ. If we do, we shall then be sharing a life which
was begotten, not made, which always has existed and always will exist. Christ
is the Son of God. If we share in this kind of life we also shall be sons of
God. We shall love the Father as He does and the Holy Ghost will arise in us.
He came to this world and became a man in order to spread to other men the kind
of life He has - by what I call 'good infection'. Every Christian is to become
a little Christ. The whole purpose of becoming a Christian is simply nothing
else.
*This corporate behaviour may, of
course, be either better or worse than their individual behaviour.
The Son of God became a man to
enable men to become sons of God. We do not know - anyway, I do not know how
things would have worked if the human race had never rebelled against God and
joined the enemy. Perhaps every man would have been 'in Christ,' would have
shared the life of the Son of God, from the moment he was born. Perhaps the
Bios or natural life would have been drawn up into the Zoe, the uncreated life,
at once and as a matter of course. But that is guesswork. You and I are concerned
with the way things work now.
And the present state of things
is this. The two kinds of life are now not only different (they would always
have been that) but actually opposed. The natural life in each of us is
something self-centred, something that wants to be petted and admired, to take
advantage of other lives, to exploit the whole universe. And especially it
wants to be left to itself: to keep well away from anything better or stronger
or higher than it, anything that might make it feel small. It is afraid of the
light and air of the spiritual world, just as people who have been brought up
to be dirty are afraid of a bath. And in a sense it is quite right. It knows
that if the spiritual life gets hold of it, all its self-centredness and self-will
are going to be killed and it is ready to fight tooth and nail to avoid that.
Did you ever think, when you were
a child, what fun it would be if your toys could come to life? Well suppose you
could really have brought them to life. Imagine turning a tin soldier into a
real little man. It would involve turning the tin into flesh. And suppose the
tin soldier did not like it. He is not interested in flesh; all he sees is that
the tin is being spoilt. He thinks you are killing him. He will do everything
he can to prevent you He will not be made into a man if he can help it.
What you would have done about
that tin soldier I do not know. But what God did about us was this. The Second
Person in God, the Son, became human Himself was born into the world as an actual
man - a real man of a particular height, with hair of a particular colour,
speaking a particular language, weighing so many stone. The Eternal Being, who
knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but
(before that) a baby, and before that a foetus inside a Woman's body. If you
want to get the hang of it, think how you would like to become a slug or a
crab.
The result of this was that you
now had one man who really was what all men were intended to be: one man in
whom the created life, derived from His Mother, allowed itself to be completely
and perfectly turned into the begotten life. The natural human creature in Him
was taken up fully into the divine Son. Thus in one instance humanity had, so
to speak, arrived: had passed into the life of Christ. And because the whole
difficulty for us is that the natural life has to be, in a sense, 'killed,' He
chose an earthly career which involved the killing of His human desires at
every turn - poverty, misunderstanding from His own family, betrayal by one of
His intimate friends, being jeered at and manhandled by the Police, and
execution by torture. And then, after being thus killed-killed every day in a
sense - the human creature in Him, because it was united to the divine Son, came
to life again. The Man in Christ rose again: not only the God. That is the
whole point. For the first time we saw a real man. One tin soldier - real tin,
just like the rest - had come fully and splendidly alive.
And here, of course, we come to
the point where my illustration about the tin soldier breaks down. In the case
of real toy soldiers or statues, if one came to life, it would obviously make
no difference to the rest. They are all separate. But human beings are not.
They look separate because you see them walking about separately. But then, we
are so made that we can see only the present moment. If we could see the past,
then of course it would look different. For there was a time when every man was
part of his mother, and (earlier still) part of his father as well: and when
they were part of his grandparents. If you could see humanity spread out in
time, as God sees it, it would not look like a lot of separate things dotted
about. It would look like one single growing thing - rather like a very complicated
tree. Every individual would appear connected with every other. And not only
that. Individuals are not really separate from God any more than from one
another. Every man, woman, and child all over the world is feeling and
breathing at this moment only because God, so to speak, is 'keeping him going'.
Consequently, when Christ becomes
man it is not really as if you could become one particular tin soldier. It is
as if something which is always affecting the whole human mass begins, at one
point, to affect the whole human mass in a new way. From that point the effect
spreads through all mankind. It makes a difference to people who lived before
Christ as well as to people who lived after Him. It makes a difference to
people who have never heard of Him. It is like dropping into a glass of water
one drop of something which gives a new taste or a new colour to the whole lot.
But, of course, none of these illustrations really works perfectly. In the long
run God is no one but Himself and what He does is like nothing else. You could
hardly expect it to be.
What, then, is the difference
which He has made to the whole human mass? It is just this; that the business
of becoming a son of God, of being turned from a created thing into a begotten
thing, of passing over from the temporary biological life into timeless
'spiritual' life, has been done for us. Humanity is already 'saved' in
principle. We individuals have to appropriate that salvation. But the really
tough work-the bit we could not have done for ourselves -has been done for us.
We have not got to try to climb up into spiritual life by our own efforts: -it
has already come down into the human race. If we will only lay ourselves open
to the one Man in whom it was fully present, and who, in spite of being God, is
also a real man, He will do it in us and for us. Remember what I said about
'good infection'. One of our own race has this new life. if we get close to Him
we shall catch it from Him.
Of course, you can express this
in all sorts of different ways. You can say that Christ died for our sins. You
may say that the Father has forgiven us because Christ has done for us what we
ought to have done. You may say that we are washed in the blood of the Lamb.
You may say that Christ has defeated death. They are all true. If any of them
do not appeal to you, leave it alone and get on with the formula that does.
And, whatever you do, do not start quarrelling with other people because they
use a different formula from yours.
In order to avoid misunderstanding
I here add notes on two points arising out of the last chapter.
(1) 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' 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 red 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 had 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
'sons'. 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 spiritualising them? But of course all 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 neighbours, 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 worse. 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 worse. 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.
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 had 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 want to talk about practice - what do we do next? What
difference does all this theology make: It can start making a difference
to-night. 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 realise what the words mean, you realise 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-centred 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 pretence 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
pretence 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 a quality 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 pretence of being grown-up helps them to
grow up in earnest.
Now, the moment you realise 'Here
I am, dressing up as Christ,' it is extremely likely that you will see at once
some way in which at that very moment the pretence could be made less of a
pretence 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 realise that, instead of saying your prayers, you ought
to be downstairs writing a letter, or helping your wife to wash-up. Well, go
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 pretence 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 (specially 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. 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 is 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 is 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 realises 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 then 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 sixteen 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 recognise 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 honour 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 to 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 two thousand 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.
(I) 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 me
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 realise 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.
(2) 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-centred, 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 in so far 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 pretence into a reality.' God looks at you
as if you were a little Christ: Christ stands beside you to turn you into one.
I daresay 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.
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 behaviour,' 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 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 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 arc 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.'
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 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 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 things to do. If you funk it, you will find yourself, hours later,
in 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 to 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-centred 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 ploughed 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 on 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 objects education, building, missions, holding services. Just as it
is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects - military,
political, economic, and what not. 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 there for. And
unless they are helping to increase and prolong and protect such moments, all
the laws, parliaments, armies, courts, police, economics, 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 just 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 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 I are
drawn in, a great many other things in Nature will begun to come right. The bad
dream will be over: it will be morning.
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 get 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 ell.
Now, if I may put it that way,
Our Lord is like the dentists. If you give Him an inch, He will take an ell.
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 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 to-morrow 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 realise 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 realise 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 we
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 mothers' 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 daresay we should have been quite contented to stay as vegetables or
fish - should not have wanted to be made into babies. But all the time 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 twenty-four
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 troubles come 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
thing 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 is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on:
you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently
he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurt abominably and does not
seem to make sense. What oil 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 filthiest 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.
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 behaviour 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.
(I) In the first place the
situation in the actual world is much more complicated than that. The world
does not consist of 100 per cent. Christians and 100 per cent. 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 are 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 good will 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 judgements 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.
(2) 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 neighbourhood.
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 Whitesmile's 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 Whitesmile's (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 Miss Bates's 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 is being managed in Dick Firkin's case is much `nicer'
than what is being managed in Miss Bates's. 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.
(3) 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 have 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 in Miss
Bates the narrow mind 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 fulfil 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 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 any more. 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 the natures they offer or withhold
are, at that 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
they 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 in nasty ones - refuse His
request. And then, 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 colours. 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 realises 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 be really 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 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 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
realise your need for God. If everything seems to come simply by signing
cheques, 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 it?' 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 recognise 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.
But 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 day 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 must try to produce a world where
all have plenty to eat. But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded 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 the 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 are 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 I 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 tense,
alone with Him. You cannot put Him off with speculations about your next door
neighbours or memories of what you have read in books. What will all that
chatter and hearsay count (will you even be able to remember it?) when the
anaesthetic fog which we call 'nature' or `the real world' fades away and the
Presence in which you have always stood becomes palpable, immediate, and
unavoidable?
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 emphasise 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 get weeded out.)
Perhaps a modern man can
understand the Christian idea best if he takes it in connection with Evolution.
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 armoured 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 armour. 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, unarmoured
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 thing happened, very few people
noticed that it was happening.
Now, if you care to talk in these
terms, the Christian view is precisely that the 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
two thousand 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 are 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.
(I) 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 centre 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 for ever 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'.
(4) 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 two thousand years is almost nothing in the history
of the universe. (Never forget that 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 realise 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 even broken out in
some new place. No wonder they hate us.)
(5) 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 the 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 recognisable: but others can be recognised. 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, recognisable; 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, specially women, that is the
harder 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 recognised one of them, you
will recognise the next one much more easily. And I strongly suspect (but how
should I know?) that they recognise one another immediately and infallibly,
across every barrier of colour, 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 have been
saying in this last book might make you suppose that that was bound to be so.
To become new men means losing what we now call 'ourselves'. Out of our selves,
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. Is it 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 know 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 that 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 tastes 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
surroundings and 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 'fly 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 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' to so 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 to 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 are 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 twopence 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 favourite wishes every day and death of your whole body in the end submit with every fibre 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.
From: http://worldviewsindex.tripod.com/trinity.html.