Will Christianity Help Me?

Greetings,

C. S. Lewis, one of the greatest Christian apologists of this century, continues to have a profound and far reaching effect on people.  The following is a passage from “Man or Rabbit” in God in the Dock.  (Remember that this was written in England in the 1950s, long before our concern for “inclusive” language.)

Will Christianity Help Me?

But still—for intellectual honour has sunk very low in our age—I hear someone whimpering on with his question, “Will it help me?  Will it make me happy?  Do you really think I’d be better if I became a Christian?”  Well, if you must have it, my answer is “Yes.”  But I don’t like giving an answer at all at this stage.  Here is a door, behind which, according to some people, the secret of the universe is waiting for you.  Either that’s true, or it isn’t.  And if it isn’t, then what the door really conceals is simply the greatest fraud, the most colossal “sell” on record.  Isn’t it obviously the job of every man (that is a man and not a rabbit) to try to find out which, and then to devote his full energies either to serving this tremendous secret or to exposing and destroying this gigantic humbug?  Faced with such an issue, can you really remain wholly absorbed in your own blessed “moral development”?

All right, Christianity will do you good—a great deal more good than you ever wanted or expected.  And the first bit of good it will do you is to hammer into your head (you won’t enjoy that!) the fact that what you have hitherto called “good”—all that about “leading a decent life” and “being kind”—isn’t quite the magnificent and all-important affair you supposed.  It will teach you that in fact you can’t be “good” (not for twenty-four hours) on your own moral efforts.  And then it will teach you that even if you were, you still shouldn’t have achieved the purpose for which you were created.  Mere morality is not the end of life.   You were made for something quite different from thatThe people who keep on asking if they can’t lead a decent life without Christ, don’t know what life is about; if they did they would know that “a decent life” is mere machinery compared with the thing we men are really made for.  Morality is indispensable: but the Divine Life, which gives itself to us and which calls us to be gods, intends for us something in which morality will be swallowed up.  We are to be re-made.  All the rabbit in us is to disappear—the worried, conscientious, ethical rabbit as well as the cowardly and sensual rabbit.  We shall bleed and squeal as the handfuls of fur come out; and then, surprisingly, we shall find underneath it all a thing we have never yet imagined: a real Man, and ageless god, a son of God, strong, radiant, wise, beautiful, and drenched in joy.

Yours & His,

DED