"As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you."
"Love in this second sense- love as distinct from 'being in love'-is not merely a feeling. It is a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit; reinforced by (in Christian marriages) the grace which both partners ask, and receive, from God. They can have this love for each other even at those moments when they do not like each other."
"Enemy-occupied territory- that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery."
"I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic- on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to."
This is discussing the Golden Rule: "The real job of every moral teacher is to keep bringing us back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like bring a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bring a child back and back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.
This man's insights are amazing! I am blown away by the knowledge he had and has. For someone outside of our religion he hit the nail squarely on the head a number of times. Reading this book made me think of the parable Jesus taught about the talents in Matthew 25. I also remembered the Law of Consecration in D&C 82:18-19. I can't believe how I benefit by so many peoples different talents and their willingness to share them with us! How lucky am I!
When I think of C.S. Lewis I always think of how Elder Maxwell would always quote him. I know that Elder Maxwell had a love and respect for this man. After reading some of his works how couldn't you? ( I have read The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters, A Grief Observed, and now this.) Can you imagine it or picture it C.S. Lewis (Jack, that is what he preferred to be called) up in heaven having a little chat with Elder Maxwell. Some how for me that doesn't seem to far distant.
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