Reading the works of this author made me rethink religion. I started with all of The Chronicles of Narnia and moved to his nonfiction. This is an essay from Mere Christianity, with parts cut out for a speech.
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"There is one vice which everyone is a victim, and of which
hardly anyone ever imagine that they are guilty. I have heard people admit
that they are bad-tempered, or that they cannot keep their heads about girls or
drink, or even that they are cowards. I've hardly heard anyone who
was not a Christian accuse himself of this. And the more we have it ourselves,
the more we dislike it in others.
I'm talking of Pride or Self-Conceit. In Christian
teachings, it is the utmost evil. Unchastity, anger, greed, and all that, are
mere fleabites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the
devil. Pride leads to every other vice. It is the complete anti-God state of
mind.
Does this seem exaggerated? If so, think it over. It is said
if you want to find out how proud you are the easiest way is to ask yourself,
"How much do I dislike it when other people snub me, or refuse to take any
notice of me, or patronise me, or show off?" The point is a person's pride is in
competition with everyone else's pride. It's because I wanted to be the big
noise at the party that I am so annoyed at someone else being the big noise.
Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of
having more of it than the next man. If everyone were equal there would be
nothing to be proud about. It’s the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure
of being above the rest. Once competition has gone, pride has gone. Almost all
evils in the world which we blame to greed or selfishness are really far more
the result of Pride.
In God you
come up against something which is in every
respect immeasurably superior
to yourself. As long as you are proud you cannot know God.
A proud man is always looking down on things and people: and as long as you are
looking down, you can't see something that is above you.
That raises a terrible question.
How is it that people who are quite obviously eaten up with Pride can say they
believe in God and appear to themselves very religious? I am afraid it means
they are worshipping an imaginary God. They theoretically admit themselves to
be nothing in the presence of this phantom God, but are really all the time
imagining how He approves of them and thinks them far better than ordinary
people: that is, they pay a pennyworth of imaginary humility to Him and get out
of it a pound's worth of Pride towards their fellow-men.
I suppose it was of
those people Christ was thinking when He said that some would preach about Him
and cast out devils in His name, only to be told at the end of the world that
He had never known them. And any of us may at any moment be in this death-trap.
Luckily, we have a test. Whenever we find that our religious life is making us
feel that we are good - above all, that we are better than someone else - I think
we may be sure that we are being acted on, not by God, but by the devil. The
real test of being in the presence of God is that you either forget about
yourself altogether or see yourself as a small, dirty object. It is better to
forget about yourself altogether.
Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the possibility of
love, or contentment, or even common sense.
If anyone would like to have humility, I think I can tell
him the first step: realize that you are proud. That's a big step, too. At
least, nothing whatever can be done before it. If you think you are not
conceited, it means you are very conceited indeed."
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