I noticed recently, in things I was reading, that several scientists pointed to the writings of C S Lewis as an important influence in their journey to faith. It’s a while since I read any of Lewis’ devotional books, so I set myself the task of finding second-hand or free copies and re-reading as many of his books as I could.

A few of the more popular books are still missing from my collection (‘Miracles’ and The Four Loves’ are the most obvious), but I have done quite well for not very much cost.

I decided to kick off by reading possibly the most well-known of Lewis’ Christian books, ‘Mere Christianity’. This book was originally a set of scripts for some radio broadcasts. I was quite surprised how dated the style of writing and many of Lewis’ expressions have become (the book was published in 1952, the year of my birth), but Lewis seems to have a knack of explaining difficult ideas in a simple yet thought provoking way.

Today I came across this (in my opinion, anyway) real gem, in the chapter on ‘Christian Marriage’, although its application is so much broader than just in the field of human relationships…

…make quite sure you are judging me by what you really know from your own experience and from watching the lives of your friends, and not from ideas you have derived from novels and films. This is not as easy to do as people think. Our experience is coloured through and through by books and plays and the cinema, and it takes patience and skill to disentangle the things we have really learned from life for ourselves.

    People get from books the idea that if you have married the right person you may expect to go on ‘being in love’ for ever. As a result, when they find they are not, they think this proves they have made a mistake and are entitled to a change – not realising that, when they have changed, the glamour will presently go out of the new love just as it went out of the old one. In this department of life, as in every other, thrills come at the beginning and do not last. The sort of thrill a boy has at the first idea of flying will not go on when he has joined the R. A. F. And is really learning to fly. The thrill you feel on first seeing some delightful place dies away when you really go to live there. Does this mean it would be better not to learn to fly and not to live in a beautiful place? By no means. In both cases, if you go through with it, the dying away of the first thrill will be compensated for by a quieter and more lasting kind of interest. What is more (and I can hardly find words to tell you how important I think this is), it is just the people who are willing to submit to the loss of the thrill and settle down to sober interests, who are then most likely to meet new thrills in some quite different direction…

…That is, I think, one little part of what Christ meant by saying that a thing will not really live unless it first dies. It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go – let it die away – go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow – and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life…

(From ‘Mere Christianity’, chapter 6, p 90-91 in my edition)