For about a hundred years we have so concentrated /on one of the virtues—‘kindness’ or mercy—
that most of us do not feel anything /except kindness to be really good or anything but cruelty to be really bad.
[Such lopsided ethical developments] are not uncommon,
and other ages too have had their pet virtues and curious insensibilities.
And if one virtue must be cultivated /at the expense of all the rest,
none has a higher claim than mercy—for every Christian must reject with detestation that covert propaganda for cruelty
//which tries to drive mercy out of the world /by calling it names such as ‘Humanitarianism’ and ‘Sentimentality’.
The real trouble is that ‘kindness’ is a quality fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds.
Everyone feels benevolent /if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment.
Thus a man easily comes /to console himself for all his other vices by a conviction that ‘his heart’s in the right place’
and ‘he wouldn’t hurt a fly’, though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice /for a fellow creature.
We think () we are kind /when we are only happy:
it is not so easy, on the same grounds, to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble.
From The Problem of Pain
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis