I believe in
Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it,
but because by it I see everything else.
I have found a desire
within myself that no experience in this world can satisfy; the most probable
explanation is that I was made for another world.
Progress means getting nearer to the place you want to be.
And if you have taken a wrong turning, then to go forward does not get you any
nearer. If you are on the wrong road, progress means doing an about-turn and
walking back to the right road; and in that case the man who turns back soonest
is the most progressive man.
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so
cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does
not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I
comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?
I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish
thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great
moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we
must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said
would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic — on the level
with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of
Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God,
or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can
spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him
Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being
a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.
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