In ‘Mere Christianity’ C. S. Lewis wrote:
. . . . Does it not make a great difference whether I am, so to speak, the landlord of my own mind and body, or only a tenant, responsible to the real landlord? If someone else made me, for his own purposes, then I shall have a lot of duties which I should not have if I simply belonged to myself.
Again, Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever. Perhaps my bad temper or jealousy are gradually getting worse—so gradually that the increase in seventy years will not be very noticeable. But it might be absolute hell in a million years: in fact, if Christianity is true, Hell is the precisely correct term for what it would be. And immortality makes this other difference, which, by the way, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy. If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization, which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization , compared with his, is only a moment.
It seems, then, that if we are to think about morality, we must think of all three departments: relations between man and man: things inside each man: and relations between man and the power that made him. We can all cooperate in the first one. Disagreements begin with the second and become serious with the third. It is in dealing with the third that many differences between Christian and non-Christian morality come out. For the rest of this book (Mere Christianity) I am going to assume the Christian point of view, and look at the whole picture as it will be if Christianity is true.
(This was from the first page of chapter 2, p.73 of ‘Mere Christianity’. . . .to be continued, k)
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