C.S. Lewis

I think the most pitiable was a female Ghost. Her trouble was the very opposite of that which afflicted the other, the lady frightened by the Unicorns. This seemed quite unaware of her phantasmal appearance. More than one of the Solid People tried to talk to her, and at first I was quite at a loss to understand her behaviour to them. She appeared to be contorting her all but invisible face and writhing her smokelike body in a quite meaningless fashion. At last I came to the conclusion - incredible as it seemed - that she supposed herself still capable of attracting them and was trying to do so. She was a thing that had become incapable of conceiving conversation save as a means to that end. If a corpse already liquid with decay had arisen from the coffin, smeared its gums with lipstick, and attempted flirtation, the result could not have been more appalling. In the end she muttered, 'Stupid creatures,' and turned back to the bus.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, Chapter 9

C.S. Lewis

If he is an arrogant man with contempt for the body really based on delicacy but mistaken by him for purity - and one who takes pleasure in flouting what most of his fellows approve - by all means let him decide against love. Instil into him an overweening ascetism and then, when you have separated his sexuality from all that might humanise it, weigh in on him with it some much more brutal and cynical form. If, on the other hand, he is an emotional, gullible man, feed him on minor poets and fifth-rate novelists of the old school until you have made him believe that 'Love' is both irresistable and somehow intrinsically meritorious. This belief is not much help, I grant you, in producing casual unchastity; but it is an incomparable recipe for prolonged, 'noble', romantic tragic adulteries, ending if all goes well, in murders and suicides. Failing that, it can be used to steer the patient into a useful marriage. For marriage, though the Enemy's invention, has its uses. There must be several young women in your patient's neighbourhood who would render the Christian life intensely difficult to him if only you could persuade him to marry one of them.

C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Chapter 19

Jeesus

Rukoilkaa te siis näin:

Isä meidän, joka olet taivaissa! Pyhitetty olkoon sinun nimesi. Tulkoon sinun valtakuntasi. Tapahtukoon sinun tahtosi, myös maan päällä niin kuin taivaassa.

Matt. 6:9-10

C.S. Lewis

Remember, this repentence, this willing submission to humiliation and a kind of death, is not something God demands of you before He will take you back and which He could let you off if He chose: it is simply a description of what going back to Him is like. If you ask God to take you back without it, you are really asking Him to let you go back without going back. It cannot happen. Very well, then, we must go through with it. But the same badness which makes us need it, makes us unable to do it. Can we do it if God helps us? Yes, but what do we mean when we talk of God helping us? We mean God putting into us a bit of Himself, so to speak. He lends us a little of His reasoning powers and that is how we think: He puts a little of His love into us and that is how we love one another. When you teach a child writing, you hold its hand while it forms the letters: that is, it forms the letters because you are forming them. We love and reason because God loves and reasons and holds our hand while we do it. Now if we had not fallen, that would all be plain sailing. But unfortunately we now need God's help in order to do something which God, in His own nature, never does at all - to surrender, to suffer, to submit, to die. Nothing in God's nature corresponds to this process at all. So that the one road for which we now need God's leadership most of all is a road God, in His own nature, has never walked. God can share only what He has: this thing, in His own nature, He has not.

But supposing God became a man - suppose our human nature which can suffer and die was amalgamated with God's nature in one person - then that person could help us. He could surrender His will, and suffer and die, because He was man; and He could do it perfectly because He was God. You and I can go through this process only if God does it in us; but God can do it only if He becomes man. Our attempts at this dying will succeed only if we men share in God's dying, just as our thinking can succeed only because it is a drop out of the ocean of His intelligence: but we cannot share God's dying unless God dies; and He cannot die except by being a man. That is the sense in which He pays our debt, and suffers for us what He Himself need not suffer at all.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, Book II, Chapter 4

H.L. Mencken

If the Bible is true, the fundamentalists are right

H.L. Mencken

A.W. Tozer

Are you sure you want to be filled with a Spirit who, though He is like Jesus in His gentleness and love, will nevertheless demand to be Lord of your life? Are you willing to let your personality be taken over by another, even if that other be the Spirit of God Himself? If the Spirit takes charge of your life, He will expect unquestioning obedience in everything. He will not tolerate in you the self-sins even though they are permitted and excused by most Christians. By the self-sins I mean self-love, self-pity, self-seeking, self-confidence, self-righteousness, self-aggrandizement, self-defence. You will find the Spirit to be in sharp opposition to the easy ways of the world and of the mixed multitude within precincts of religion. He will be jealous over you for good. He will not allow you to boast or swagger or show off. He will reserve the right to test you, to discipline you, to chasten you for your soul's sake. He may strip you of many of those borderline pleasures which other Christians enjoy but which are to you a source of refined evil. Through it all He will enfold you in love so vast, so mighty, so all-embracing, so wondrous that your very losses will seem like gains and your small pains like pleasures. Yet the flesh will whimper under His yoke and cry out against it as a burden too great to bear. And you will be permitted to enjoy the solemn privilege of suffering to 'fill up that which is behind of the affliction of Christ' (Colossians 1:24) in your flesh for His body's sake, which is the Church. Now, with the conditions before you, do you still want to be filled with the Holy Spirit?

A.W. Tozer, The Best of A.W. Tozer, pp. 76-77

A.W. Tozer

Protestantism is on the wrong road when itr tries to win merely by means of a "united front." It is not organizational unity we need most; the great need is power. The headstones in the cemetary present a united front, but they stand mute and helpless while the world passes by.

A.W. Tozer, God's Pursuit of Man