Mere Christianity – Book IV – Chapter 8 (“Is Christianity Hard Or Easy?”)
Picking back up my notes for C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”…
1. Becoming a “son of God” is the entire point of Christianity
What I want to make clear is that this is not one among many jobs a Christian has to do; and it is not a sort of special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of Christianity. Christianity offers nothing else at all.
2. Becoming a “son of God” is not the same thing as “being good”
And I should like to point out how it differs from ordinary ideas of “morality” and “being good.”
(a) A person typically begins by recognizing the demands of the Moral Law upon his desires
We take as starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and interests. We then admit that something else call it “morality”… has claims on this self: claims which interfere with its own desires… Some of the things the ordinary self wanted to do turn out to be what we call “wrong”: well, we must give them up. Other things…turn out to be what we call “right”: well, we shall have to do them.
(b) We secretly hope that once we have met these demands, the natural self will be free to do what it wants
But we are hoping all the time that when all the demands have been met, the poor natural self will still have some chance, and some time, to get on with its own life and do what it likes.
(c) However, this will not work
…if you are really going to try to meet all the demands made on the natural self, it will not have enough left over to live on. The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you. And your natural self, which is thus being starved and hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier and angrier.