Social Morality - Mere Christianity | C.S. Lewis

Mere Christianity  | C.S. Lewis

Today as I was going through my laptop bag, I found a book my dear friend Kacie sent to me a few months ago. Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. As I opened the book to maybe catch a page or two, I quickly realized it wasn’t a book to “catch a page or two”. My Dad entered the room and I asked him if he had read much C.S. Lewis, he kind of chuckled and replied that C.S. Lewis was genius. He was the type who stepped up to a level and thought so broad and when he wrote, it took 5 minutes to digest one sentence, reading it over and over again.

So I’m learning that if I want to dive into this book, it’s going to take #1: complete silence and #2: time. Time to dive in and get into that philosophical thinking mode. So I’ve decided to take this book little by little, breaking off each chunk, or chapter if you will and trying to digest it slowly to understand it fully.

Bear with me.

Tonight I skimmed through the first couple pages but when I flipped to Chapter 3, it stuck out at me so it looks like I’m going to start there.

Mere Christianity
C.S. Lewis

Book 3 | Christian Behaviour3: Social Morality (pg. 82)

The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this department Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what every  one, at bottom, had always known to be right. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr. Johnson said, ‘People need to be reminded more often than they need to be instructed.’ The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles of which we are all so anxious not to see; like bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and back to the bit of its lesson that it wants to shirk.

The second thing to get clear is that Christianity has not, and does not profess to have, a detailed political programme for applying ‘Do as you would be done by’ to a particular society at a particular moment. It could not have. It is meant for all men at all times and the particular programme which suited one place or time would not suit another. And, anyhow, that is not how Christianity works. When it tells you to feed the hungry it does not give you lessons in cookery. When it tells you to read Scriptures it does not give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or even in English grammar. It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal.

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