C. S. Lewis Day

Last year at this time I wrote a respectful and appreciative entry on C. S. Lewis, the eminent Christian apologist. In it I noted that this brilliant and influential man died on 22 November 1963, the same day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Although President Kennedy will always be remembered in American history books, Mr. Lewis will be thought of with appreciation for decades to come by untold thousands of solid Christians because of the illuminative insights he published in books and essays of his authorship:

Mere Christianity
The Four Loves
Surprised by Joy
The Great Divorce
The Screwtape Letters
Miracles: A Preliminary Study
George MacDonald: An Anthology
The Abolition of Man
God in the Dock: Essays on Theology

These, and other books of his letters, essays, and his fictional works (Space Trilogy and others) have been extremely valuable for me in my adult sojourn in mortality, and have been a delight to review regularly.

As noted previously, C. S. Lewis is highly ranked as one of my most highly esteemed and influential heroes. If your list of heroes is short, or your view of man and his potential is jaded, a sampling of his work is highly recommended.

I end today with a very typical excerpt from Mere Christianity:

“Let us go back to the man who says that a thing cannot be wrong unless it hurts some other human being. He quite understands that he must not damage the other ships in the convoy, but he honestly thinks that what he does to his own ship is simply his own business. But does it not make a great difference whether his ship is his own property or not? 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 somebody 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….

“Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever…. Now there are a good many things which would not be worth bothering about if I were going to live only seventy years, but which I had better bother about very seriously if I am going to live for ever. Perhaps my bad temper or my 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 the correct technical term for what it would be.” (Mere Christianity, Book III, chapt. 1)