C.S. Lewis wrote:
First, as to the meaning of the word. “Charity” now means what used to be called “alms”—that is giving to the poor. Originally it had a much wider meaning. (You can see how it got the modern sense. If a man has “charity,” giving to the poor is one of the most obvious things he does, and so people came to talk as if that were the whole of charity. In the same way “rhyme” is the most obvious thing about poetry, and so people come to mean by “poetry” simply rhyme and nothing more.) Charity means “Love” in the Christian sense.” But love, in the Christian sense, does not mean an emotion. It is a state not of the feelings but of the will: that state of the will which we have naturally about ourselves, and must learn to have about other people.
. . . . our love for ourselves does not mean that we like ourselves. It means that we wish our own good. In the same way Christian Love (or Charity) for our neighbors is quite a different thing from liking or affection. We “like” or are “fond of” some people, and not of others. It is important to understand that this natural “liking” is neither a sin nor a virtue, any more than your likes in food are a sin or a virtue. It is just a fact. But, of course, what we do about it is either sinful or virtuous.
Natural liking or affection for people makes it easier to be “charitable” towards them. It is, therefore, normally a duty to encourage our affections—to “like” people as much as we can. . . not because this liking is itself the virtue of charity, but because it is a help to it. On the other hand, it is also necessary to keep a very sharp look-out for fear our liking for some one person makes us uncharitable, or even unfair, to someone else. There are even cases where our liking conflicts with our charity towards the person we like. For example, a doting mother may be tempted by natural affection to “spoil” her child; that is, to gratify her own affectionate impulses at the expense of the child’s real happiness later on.
But though natural likings should normally be encouraged, it would be quite wrong to think that the way to become charitable is to sit trying to manufacture affectionate feelings. Some people are “cold’ by temperament; that may be a misfortune for them, but is no more a sin than having bad digestion is a sin; and it does not cut them out from the chance, or excuse them from the duty, of learning charity. The rule of all this is perfectly simple. Do not waste time bothering whether you “love” your neighbor; act as if you did. As soon as we do this we find one of the great secrets. When you are behaving as if you love someone you will presently come to love him. If you injure someone you dislike, you will find yourself disliking him more. If you do him a good turn, you will find yourself disliking him less. There is, indeed, one exception. If you do him a good turn, not to please God and obey the law of charity, but to show him what a fine good chap you are, and to put him in your debt, and then sit down to wait for his “gratitude,” you will probably be disappointed. (People are not fools: they have a very quick eye for anything like showing off, or patronage.) But whenever we do good to another self, just because it is a self, made (like us) by God, and desiring its own happiness as we desire ours, we shall have learned to love it a little more or, at least, to dislike it less.
Consequently, though Christian charity sounds a very cold thing to people whose heads are full of sentimentality, and though it is quite distinct from affection, yet it leads to affection. The difference between a Christian and a worldly man is not that the worldly man has only affections or “likings” and the Christian has only “charity.” The worldly man treats certain people kindly because he “likes” them: the Christian, trying to treat everyone kindly, finds himself liking more and more people as he goes on—including people he could not even have imagined himself liking at the beginning. ~ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, (Macmillan Publishing co., Inc) 115-17
