Conclusion

For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 1 CORINTHIANS 13:12

We have covered a great deal of ground in fifteen short chapters, and it would be easy to come away with the impression that Lewis was a man of many subjects. In one sense he was. He wrote about longing and logic, Christ and the creeds, pride and temptation, pain and grief, prayer and love, myth and miracle, heaven and hell, and he wrote about all of them in poetry, fiction, essays, sermons, letters and broadcast talks. But beneath the variety there was a single conviction, held with growing depth from the night on Addison’s Walk to the day of his death. It was that Christianity is true — not merely useful, not merely comforting, not merely beautiful, but true — and that because it is true, it is the key to everything else.

One thread

Look back over the chapters and the thread appears. The longing he called joy was a pointer to the God who made us for Himself. The moral law was the witness of that same God in conscience. The claims of Jesus were the claims of that God made flesh. The common faith of the church was the faith in that incarnate Lord, handed down. Pride was the refusal to bow to Him; humility the freedom of forgetting oneself before Him. The new life was His own life shared with His children. Temptation was the enemy’s attempt to draw them away; pain and grief were the hard places in which He held on to them; prayer was their speech with Him. The four loves were images of His love; myth was the dream of Him, and history the fact. Miracles were His acts in His own creation; glory was His gift; and heaven and hell were the final answer to the question of whether we would have Him.

For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen. ROMANS 11:36

What to do with it

If you have read this far, you face the danger that every reader of Lewis faces. His books are a pleasure to read. They are clear, witty and wise, and they flatter the intelligence of the reader by taking it seriously. It is possible to enjoy them enormously and to change not at all. Lewis would have regarded that as a failure — his, and yours. He wrote to bring his readers to Christ, not to make them admirers of C. S. Lewis.

But be ye doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves. JAMES 1:22

So here is the plainest counsel this book can give. Go back to the chapter that troubled you most — not the one you found most interesting, but the one you would rather not read again. That is likely to be where God is at work. Take its points for reflection and act on them, one at a time, over the coming weeks. Then go to Lewis’s own books, beginning with the guide in the next chapter, and read him for yourself. And then, above all, go past him to the Scriptures he loved and to the Lord he served.

Two things to carry

Carry away, first, a confidence that the faith is true. Lewis had been an atheist, and a clever one, and he did not come to Christ because he stopped thinking. He came because he thought harder. The Christian has no need to be afraid of hard questions, and no need to leave his mind at the church door. The God who made reason is the God who saves, and the more truly we think, the more clearly we shall see Him.

Carry away, second, a sense of how much is at stake in ordinary life. Lewis believed that every choice, every temptation resisted or yielded to, every kindness or cruelty, is part of the long process by which human beings become what they will be for ever. Nothing is merely small. The way we pray, the way we treat our families, the way we give, the way we bear suffering, are all part of the making of eternal souls — ours and others’.

Therefore, my beloved brethren, be ye stedfast, unmoveable, always abounding in the work of the Lord, forasmuch as ye know that your labour is not in vain in the Lord. 1 CORINTHIANS 15:58

A last word about the man

We have been honest in these pages about the points at which Lewis must be weighed. He believed in a purifying purgatory and prayed for the dead. He hoped that some who never knew Christ’s name might be saved by Him, and he put that hope into a story. He held a view of Scripture’s inspiration that fell short of the evangelical confidence in its entire truthfulness. He accepted an evolutionary account of human origins and offered a speculative account of the Fall to fit it. He declined to commit himself on the way the cross saves us, and on much else that evangelicals regard as essential.

None of this has been raised to diminish him. It has been raised because he would have insisted on it. He had no patience with readers who treated any human author as beyond question, and he was always the first to point beyond himself. Generations of believers, many of them evangelicals, have found in his books a clear and faithful guide to the heart of the Christian faith, and they have been right to do so. They have also been right to read him with their Bibles open.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. 2 CORINTHIANS 4:7

Lewis died on the twenty-second of November, 1963, at his home in Oxford. He had spent thirty-two years trying to help others see what he had come to see: that the longing in the human heart is a longing for God, that God has come to us in Jesus Christ, and that in Him every good thing we have loved will be given back to us, and more. He now sees face to face what he once saw through a glass, darkly. The right response to him is not admiration but faith in the One he served.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Return to the chapter of this book that most troubled you. Read it again, and act on the first of its points this week.

2. Obtain one of Lewis’s own books and begin reading it this month.

3. Ask yourself whether you have been afraid of hard questions about your faith. Bring one of them to God, and to a wise Christian friend.

4. Choose one ordinary part of your life — your work, your home, your giving — and offer it to God as part of the making of an eternal soul.

5. Read 1 Corinthians 13 and 15 aloud, and end in thanksgiving for the hope of glory.

A PRAYER

Lord God, You are the truth, and You have come to us in Jesus Christ.

Thank You for the servant whose life and words we have been considering. Thank You for the many You have drawn to Yourself through him.

Do not let me stop at admiring him. Bring me to the Christ he served, and make me a doer of Your word.

Keep me faithful in small things, strong in suffering, honest in prayer and generous in love, until I see You face to face. Amen.