Mere
Christianity
C.S. Lewis
C.S. Lewis
Book 3 | Christian
Behaviour3: Faith (pg. 138)
I must talk in this chapter about what the Christians call
Faith. Roughly speaking, the word Faith seems to be used by Christians in two
senses or on two levels, and I will take them in turn. In the first sense it
means simply Belief -- accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of
Christianity. That is fairly simple. But what does puzzle people –at least it
used to puzzle me – is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a
virtue. I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue –what is there moral or
immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements? Obviously, I used
to say, a sane man accepts or rejects any statement, not because he wants to or
does not want to, but because the evidence seems to him good or bad. If he were
mistaken about the goodness or badness of the evidence that would not mean he
was a bad man, but only that he was not very clever. And if he thought the
evidence bad but tried to force himself to believe in spite of it, that would
be merely stupid.
