Mere Christianity by CS Lewis

I’m about halfway through this book now, and it’s simply amazing. I love his writing style, but even more, I love his ideas. The illustrations he uses takes my thoughts and makes them much more clear. Here’s an excerpt from page 85, one that I really like.

Imagine three men who go to war. One has the ordinary natural fear of danger that any man has and he subdues it by moral effort and becomes a brave man. Let us suppose that the other two have, as a result of things in their subconsciousness, exaggerated, irrational fears, which no amount of moral effort can do anything about. Now suppose that a psychoanalyst comes along and cures these two: that is, he puts them both back in the position of the first man. Well it is just then that the psychoanalytical problem is over and the moral problem begins. Because, now that they are cured, these two men might take quite different lines. The first might say, “Thank goodness I’ve got rid of all those doo-dahs. Now at last I can do what I always wanted to do– my duty to the cause of freedom.” But the other might say, “Well, I’m very glad that I now feel moderately cool under fire, but, of course, that doesn’t alter the fact that I’m still jolly well determined to look after Number One and let the other chap do the dangerous job whenever I can. Indeed one of the good things about feeling less frightened is that I can now look after myself much more efficiently and can be much cleverer at hiding the fact from the others.”

CS Lewis goes on, but to find out all that he says, you’ll have to read the book. There was another great quote from page 75 which I thought applied to Mark 2 quite well, so I emailed it to my Mark 2 group.