Today's Reading
On goodness
There is but one good;
that is God.
Everything else is good /when it looks to Him and bad when
it turns from Him.
And the higher and mightier it is in the natural
order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels.
It’s not out of bad
mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels.
The false
religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or
patriotism or art:
but lust is less likely to be made into a religion.
* base ; (of a person or a person's actions or feelings) without moral principles; ignoble.
p.67 – “Both good and evil, when they are full grown, become
retrospective…That is what mortals misunderstand. They say of some
temporary suffering, ‘No future bliss can make up for it,’ not knowing
that Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn even that agony
into a glory. And of some sinful pleasure they say ‘Let me but have
this and I’ll take the consequences’: little dreaming how damnation will
spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure of
the sin.”
* (make up for something) to take the place of something that has been lost or damaged.
* retrospective (from Latin retrospectare, "look
back"), generally, is a look back at events that took place, or works
that were produced, in the past.
p.68 – “That is why, at the end of all things, when the
sun rises here and the twilight turns to blackness down there, the
Blessed will say, “we have never lived anywhere except in heaven,’
and
the Lost, “We were always in Hell.” And both will speak truly.”
p.72
– “There are only two kinds of people in the end:
those who say to God,
“thy will be done,”
and those to whom God says, in the end, “Thy will
be done.”
p. 74 – “The whole difficulty of understanding Hell is that the thing to be understood is so nearly nothing.”
p.78
– “Those that hate goodness are sometimes nearer than those that know
nothing at all about it and think they have it already.”
p.80 –
“Every poet and musician and artist, but for Grace, is drawn away from
love of the thing he tells, to love of the telling till, down in Deep
Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say
about him.”
p.91 – “You cannot love a fellow-creature fully till you love God.”
p.92
– “No natural feelings are high or low, holy or unholy, in themselves.
They are all holy when God’s hand is on the rein. They all go bad when
they set up on their own and make themselves into false gods.”
p.95
– “There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to
eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But
there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the
natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for
gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its
corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower
passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefore, when it falls, a
fiercer devil.”
p.96 – “Every natural love will rise again and live forever in this country:
but none will rise again until it has been buried.”
“There
is but one good; that is God. Everything else is good when it looks to
Him and bad when it turns from him. And the higher and mightier it is in
the natural order, the more demoniac it will be if it rebels. It’s not
out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels.
The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of
mother-love or patriotism or art: but lust is less likely to be made
into a religion.”
p.102 – “Lust is a poor, weak, whimpering
whispering thing compared with that richness and energy of desire which
will arise when lust has been killed.”
p.110-111 – “What we
called love down there was mostly the craving to be loved. In the main I
loved you for my own sake: because I needed you…We shall have no need
for one another now: we can begin to love truly.”
p.118 – “The
demand of the loveless and the self-imprisoned that they should be
allowed to blackmail the universe: that till they consent to be happy
(on their own terms) no one else shall taste joy:
that theirs should be
the final power; that Hell should be able to veto Heaven.”
p.119
– “[The action of Pity] leaps quicker than light /from the highest place
to the lowest to bring healing and joy, whatever the cost to itself. It
changes darkness into light and evil into good. But it will not, at the
cunning tears of Hell, impose /on good [the tyranny of evil]. Every
disease that submits to a cure shall be cured: but we will not call blue
yellow to please those who insist on having jaundice, nor make a midden
of the world’s garden for the sake of some who cannot abide the smell
of roses.”
p.120 – “All Hell is smaller than one pebble of your
earthly world; but it is smaller than one atom of this world, the Real
World.”
From The Great Divorce
Compiled in Words to Live By
The Great Divorce.
Copyright © 1946, C. S Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright renewed 1973 C. S.
Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of
HarperCollins Publishers. Words to Live By: A Guide for the Merely Christian. Copyright © 2007 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
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