mere improvement is not redemption,

[soso]

‘Niceness’—wholesome, integrated personality—is an excellent thing. 

We must try by every medical, educational, economic, and political means in our power 

to produce a world //where as many people as possible grow up ‘nice’;

just as we must try to produce a world //where all have plenty to eat. 

But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded /in making everyone nice

we should have saved [their souls]. 

[A world of nice people], content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, 

would be just as desperately in need of salvation /as a miserable world

—and might even be more difficult to save.

* 형용사구 (being) content in their own niceness, 형역 현/과분사구  looking no further, turned away from God, 

For mere improvement is not redemption, 

though redemption always improves people /even here and now

and will, in the end, improve them /to a degree () we cannot yet imagine. 

God became man /to turn creatures into sons:

not simply to produce better men of the old kind /but to produce a new kind of man. 

It is not like teaching a horse to jump /better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature. 

Of course, once it has got its wings, 

it will soar /over fences //which could never have been jumped and thus beat [the natural horse] /at its own game. 

But there may be a period, while the wings are just beginning [to grow], when it cannot do so: 

and at that stage [the lumps on the shoulders]—no one could tell /by looking at them [that they are going to be wings]—

may even give [it] [an awkward appearance].

From Mere Christianity
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis