Book 3 Chapter 1-4

overwhelming that it will strike either irresistible love or irresistible horror into every creature. It

will be too late then to choose your side. There is no use saying you choose to lie down when it

has become impossible to stand up. That will not be the time for choosing: it will be the time

when we discover which side we really have chosen, whether we realised it before or not. Now,

today, this moment, is our chance to choose the right side. God is holding back to give us that

chance. It will not last for ever. We must take it or leave it.

Book 3 _________________________________________

Christian Behaviour _________________________________________

1. The Three Parts Of Morality

There is a story about a schoolboy who was asked what he thought God was like. He replied that,

as far as he could make out, God was "The sort of person who is always snooping round to see if

anyone is enjoying himself and then trying to stop it." And I am afraid that is the sort of idea that

the word Morality raises in a good many people's minds: something that interferes, something

that stops you having a good time. In reality, moral rules are directions for running the human

machine. Every moral rule is there to prevent a breakdown, or a strain, or a friction, in the

running of that machine. That is why these rules at first seem to be constantly interfering with

our natural inclinations. When you are being taught how to use any machine, the instructor keeps

on saying, "No, don't do it like that," because, of course, there are all sorts of things that look all

right and seem to you the natural way of treating the machine, but do not really work.

Some people prefer to talk about moral "ideals" rather than moral rules and about moral

"idealism" rather than moral obedience. Now it is, of course, quite true that moral perfection is

an "ideal" in the sense that we cannot achieve it. In that sense every kind of perfection is, for us

humans, an ideal; we cannot succeed in being perfect car drivers or perfect tennis players or in

drawing perfectly straight lines. But there is another sense in which it is very misleading to call

moral perfection an ideal. When a man says that a certain woman, or house, or ship, or garden is

"his ideal" he does not mean (unless he is rather a fool) that everyone else ought to have the same

ideal. In such matters we are entitled to have different tastes and, therefore, different ideals. But

it is dangerous to describe a man who tries very hard to keep the moral law as a "man of high

ideals," because this might lead you to think that moral perfection was a private taste of his own

and that the rest of us were not called on to share it. This would be a disastrous mistake. Perfect

behaviour may be as unattainable as perfect gear-changing when we drive; but it is a necessary

ideal prescribed for all men by the very nature of the human machine just as perfect gear-

changing is an ideal prescribed for all drivers by the very nature of cars. And it would be even

more dangerous to think of oneself as a person "of high ideals" because one is trying to tell no

lies at all (instead of only a few lies) or never to commit adultery (instead of committing it only

seldom) or not to be a bully (instead of being only a moderate bully). It might lead you to

become a prig and to think you were rather a special person who deserved to be congratulated on

his "idealism." In reality you might just as well expect to be congratulated because, whenever

you do a sum, you try to get it quite right. To be sure, perfect arithmetic is "an ideal"; you will

certainly make some mistakes in some calculations. But there is nothing very fine about trying to

be quite accurate at each step in each sum. It would be idiotic not to try; for every mistake is

going to cause you trouble later on. In the same way every moral failure is going to cause

trouble, probably to others and certainly to yourself. By talking about rules and obedience

instead of "ideals" and "idealism" we help to remind ourselves of these facts.

Now let us go a step further. There are two ways in which the human machine goes wrong. One

is when human individuals drift apart from one another, or else collide with one another and do

one another damage, by cheating or bullying. The other is when things go wrong inside the

individual-when the different parts of him (his different faculties and desires and so on) either

drift apart or interfere with one another. You can get the idea plain if you think of us as a fleet of

ships sailing in formation. The voyage will be a success only, in the first place, if the ships do not

collide and get in one another's way; and, secondly, if each ship is seaworthy and has her engines

in good order. As a matter of fact, you cannot have either of these two things without the other. If

the ships keep on having collisions they will not remain seaworthy very long. On the other hand,

if their steering gears are out of order they will not be able to avoid collisions. Or, if you like,

think of humanity as a band playing a tune. To get a good result, you need two things. Each

player's individual instrument must be in tune and also each must come in at the right moment so

as to combine with all the others.

But there is one thing we have not yet taken into account. We have not asked where the fleet is

trying to get to, or what piece of music the band is trying to play. The instruments might be all in

tune and might all come in at the right moment, but even so the performance would not be a

success if they had been engaged to provide dance music and actually played nothing but Dead

Marches. And however well the fleet sailed, its voyage would be a failure if it were meant to

reach New York and actually arrived at Calcutta.

Morality, then, seems to be concerned with three things. Firstly, with fair play and harmony

between individuals. Secondly, with what might be called tidying up or harmonising the things

inside each individual. Thirdly, with the general purpose of human life as a whole: what man was

made for: what course the whole fleet ought to be on: what tune the conductor of the band wants

it to play.

You may have noticed that modern people are nearly always thinking about the first thing and

forgetting the other two. When people say in the newspapers that we are striving for Christian

moral standards, they usually mean that we are striving for kindness and fair play between

nations, and classes, and individuals; that is, they are thinking only of the first thing. When a

man says about something he wants to do, "It can't be wrong because it doesn't do anyone else

any harm," he is thinking only of the first thing. He is thinking it does not matter what his ship is

like inside provided that he does not run into the next ship. And it is quite natural, when we start

thinking about morality, to begin with the first thing, with social relations. For one thing, the

results of bad morality in that sphere are so obvious and press on us every day: war and poverty

and graft and lies and shoddy work. And also, as long as you stick to the first thing, there is very

little disagreement about morality. Almost all people at all times have agreed (in theory) that

human beings ought to be honest and kind and helpful to one another. But though it is natural to

begin with all that, if our thinking about morality stops there, we might just as well not have

thought at all. Unless we go on to the second thing-the tidying up inside each human being-we

are only deceiving ourselves.

What is the good of telling the ships how to steer so as to avoid collisions if, in fact, they are

such crazy old tubs that they cannot be steered at all? What is the good of drawing up, on paper,

rules for social behaviour, if we know that, in fact, our greed, cowardice, ill temper, and self-

conceit are going to prevent us from keeping them? I do not mean for a moment that we ought

not to think, and think hard, about improvements in our social and economic system. What I do

mean is that all that thinking will be mere moonshine unless we realise that nothing but the

courage and unselfishness of individuals is ever going to make any system work properly. It is

easy enough to remove the particular kinds of graft or bullying that go on under the present

system: but as long as men are twisters or bullies they will find some new way of carrying on the

old game under the new system. You cannot make men good by law: and without good men you

cannot have a good society. That is why we must go on to think of the second thing: of morality

inside the individual.

But I do not think we can stop there either. We are now getting to the point at which different

beliefs about the universe lead to different behaviour. And it would seem, at first sight, very

sensible to stop before we got there, and just carry on with those parts of morality that all

sensible people agree about. But can we? Remember that religion involves a series of statements

about facts, which must be either true or false. If they are true, one set of conclusions will follow

about the right sailing of the human fleet: if they are false, quite a different set. For example, 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.

Again, Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live for ever, and this

must be either true or false. 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

correct technical term for what it would be. And immortality makes this other difference, which,

by the by, has a connection with the difference between totalitarianism and democracy. If

individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilisation, which may last for

a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if Christianity is true, then the

individual is not only more important but incomparably more important, for he is everlasting and

the life of a state or a civilisation, compared with his, is only a moment.

It seems, then, that if we are to think about morality, we must think of all three departments:

relations between man and man: things inside each man: and relations between man and the

power that made him. We can all cooperate in the first one. Disagreements begin with the second

and become serious with the third. It is in dealing with the third that the main differences

between Christian and non-Christian morality come out. For the rest of this book I am going to

assume the Christian point of view, and look at the whole picture as it will be if Christianity is

true.

2. The "Cardinal Virtues"

The previous section was originally composed to be given as a short talk on the air.

If you are allowed to talk for only ten minutes, pretty well everything else has to be sacrificed to

brevity. One of my chief reasons for dividing morality up into three parts (with my picture of the

ships sailing in convoy) was that this seemed the shortest way of covering the ground. Here I

want to give some idea of another way in which the subject has been divided by old writers,

which was too long to use in my talk, but which is a very good one.

According to this longer scheme there are seven "virtues." Four of them are called "Cardinal"

virtues, and the remaining three are called "Theological" virtues. The "Cardinal" ones are those

which all civilised people recognise: the "Theological" are those which, as a rule, only Christians

know about. I shall deal with the Theological ones later on: at present I am talking about the four

Cardinal virtues. (The word "cardinal" has nothing to do with "Cardinals" in the Roman Church.

It comes from a Latin word meaning "the hinge of a door." These were called "cardinal" virtues

because they are, as we should say, "pivotal.") They are PRUDENCE, TEMPERANCE,

JUSTICE, and FORTITUDE.

Prudence means practical common sense, taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and

what is likely to come of it. Nowadays most people hardly think of Prudence as one of the

"virtues." In fact, because Christ said we could only get into His world by being like children,

many Christians have the idea that, provided you are "good," it does not matter being a fool. But

that is a misunderstanding. In the first place, most children show plenty of "prudence" about

doing the things they are really interested in, and think them out quite sensibly. In the second

place, as St, Paul points out, Christ never meant that we were to remain children in intelligence:

on the contrary, He told us to be not only "as harmless as doves," but also "as wise as serpents."

He wants a child's heart, but a grown-up's head. He wants us to be simple, single-minded,

affectionate, and teachable, as good children are; but He also wants every bit of intelligence we

have to be alert at its job, and in first-class fighting trim. The fact that you are giving money to a

charity does not mean that you need not try to find out whether that charity is a fraud or not. The

fact that what you are thinking about is God Himself (for example, when you are praying) does

not mean that you can be content with the same babyish ideas which you had when you were a

five-year-old. It is, of course, quite true that God will not love you any the less, or have less use

for you, if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain. He has room for people

with very little sense, but He wants every one to use what sense they have. The proper motto is

not "Be good, sweet maid, and let who can be clever," but "Be good, sweet maid, and don't

forget that this involves being as clever as you can." God is no fonder of intellectual slackers

than of any other slackers. If you are thinking of becoming a Christian, I warn you you are

embarking on something which is going to take the whole of you, brains and all. But, fortunately,

it works the other way round. Anyone who is honestly trying to be a Christian will soon find his

intelligence being sharpened: one of the reasons why it needs no special education to be a

Christian is that Christianity is an education itself. That is why an uneducated believer like

Bunyan was able to write a book that has astonished the whole world.

Temperance is, unfortunately, one of those words that has changed its meaning. It now usually

means teetotalism. But in the days when the second Cardinal virtue was christened

"Temperance," it meant nothing of the sort. Temperance referred not specially to drink, but to all

pleasures; and it meant not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. It is a mistake to

think that Christians ought all to be teetotallers; Mohammedanism, not Christianity, is the

teetotal religion. Of course it may be the duty of a particular Christian, or of any Christian, at a

particular time, to abstain from strong drink, either because he is the sort of man who cannot

drink at all without drinking too much, or because he wants to give the money to the poor, or

because he is with people who are inclined to drunkenness and must not encourage them by

drinking himself. But the whole point is that he is abstaining, for a good reason, from something

which he does not condemn and which he likes to see other people enjoying. One of the marks of

a certain type of bad man is that he cannot give up a thing himself without wanting every one

else to give it up. That is not the Christian way. An individual Christian may see fit to give up all

sorts of things for special reasons-marriage, or meat, or beer, or the cinema; but the moment he

starts saying the things are bad in themselves, or looking down his nose at other people who do

use them, he has taken the wrong turning.

One great piece of mischief has been done by the modern restriction of the word Temperance to

the question of drink. It helps people to forget that you can be just as intemperate about lots of

other things. A man who makes his golf or his motor-bicycle the centre of his life, or a woman

who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog, is being just as "intemperate" as

someone who gets drunk every evening. Of course, it does not show on the outside so easily:

bridge-mania or golf-mania do not make you fall down in the middle of the road. But God is not

deceived by externals.

Justice means much more than the sort of thing that goes on in law courts. It is the old name for

everything we should now call "fairness"; it includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness,

keeping promises, and all that side of life. And Fortitude includes both kinds of courage-the kind

that faces danger as well as the kind that "sticks it" under pain. "Guts" is perhaps the nearest

modern English. You will notice, of course, that you cannot practise any of the other virtues very

long without bringing this one into play.

There is one further point about the virtues that ought to be noticed. There is a difference

between doing some particular just or temperate action and being a just or temperate man.

Someone who is not a good tennis player may now and then make a good shot. What you mean

by a good player is the man whose eye and muscles and nerves have been so trained by making

innumerable good shots that they can now be relied on. They have a certain tone or quality which

is there even when he is not playing, just as a mathematician's mind has a certain habit and

outlook which is there even when he is not doing mathematics. In the same way a man who

perseveres in doing just actions gets in the end a certain quality of character. Now it is that

quality rather than the particular actions which we mean when we talk of "virtue."

This distinction is important for the following reason. If we thought only of the particular actions

we might encourage three wrong ideas.

(1) We might think that, provided you did the right thing, it did not matter how or why you did

it-whether you did it willingly or unwillingly, sulkily or cheerfully, through fear of public

opinion or for its own sake. But the truth is that right actions done for the wrong reason do not

help to build the internal quality or character called a "virtue," and it is this quality or character

that really matters. (If the bad tennis player hits very hard, not because he sees that a very hard

stroke is required, but because he has lost his temper, his stroke might possibly, by luck, help

him to win that particular game; but it will not be helping him to become a reliable player.)

(2) We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants

people of a particular sort.

(3) We might think that the "virtues" were necessary only for this present life-that in the other

world we could stop being just because there is nothing to quarrel about and stop being brave

because there is no danger. Now it is quite true that there will probably be no occasion for just or

courageous acts in the next world, but there will be every occasion for being the sort of people

that we can become only as the result of doing such acts here. The point is not that God will

refuse you admission to His eternal world if you have not got certain qualities of character: the

point is that if people have not got at least the beginnings of those qualities inside them, then no

possible external conditions could make a "Heaven" for them-that is, could make them happy

with the deep, strong, unshakable kind of happiness God intends for us.

3. Social Morality

The first thing to get clear about Christian morality between man and man is that in this

department Christ did not come to preach any brand new morality. The Golden Rule of the New

Testament (Do as you would be done by) is a summing up of what everyone, at bottom, had

always known to be right. Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is

quacks and cranks who do that. As Dr. Johnson said, "People need to be reminded more often

than they need to be instructed." The real job of every moral teacher is to keep on bringing us

back, time after time, to the old simple principles which we are all so anxious not to see; like

bringing a horse back and back to the fence it has refused to jump or bringing a child back and

back to the bit in its lesson that it wants to shirk.

The second thing to get clear is that Christianity has not, and does not profess to have, a detailed

political programme for applying "Do as you would be done by" to a particular society at a

particular moment. It could not have. It is meant for all men at all times and the particular

programme which suited one place or time would not suit another. And, anyhow, that is not how

Christianity works. When it tells you to feed the hungry it does not give you lessons in cookery.

When it tells you to read the Scriptures it does not give you lessons in Hebrew and Greek, or

even in English grammar. It was never intended to replace or supersede the ordinary human arts

and sciences: it is rather a director which will set them all to the right jobs, and a source of

energy which will give them all new life, if only they will put themselves at its disposal.

People say, "The Church ought to give us a lead." That is true if they mean it in the right way,

but false if they mean it in the wrong way. By the Church they ought to mean the whole body of

practising Christians. And when they say that the Church should give us a lead, they ought to

mean that some Christians- those who happen to have the right talents- should be economists and

statesmen, and that all economists and statesmen should be Christians, and that their whole

efforts in politics and economics should be directed to putting "Do as you would be done by"

into action. If that happened, and if we others were really ready to take it, then we should find the

Christian solution for our own social problems pretty quickly. But, of course, when they ask for a

lead from the Church most people mean they want the clergy to put out a political programme.

That is silly. The clergy are those particular people within the whole Church who have been

specially trained and set aside to look after what concerns us as creatures who are going to live

for ever: and we are asking them to do a quite different job for which they have not been trained.

The job is really on us, on the laymen. The application of Christian principles, say, to trade

unionism or education, must come from Christian trade unionists and Christian schoolmasters:

just as Christian literature comes from Christian novelists and dramatists -not from the bench of

bishops getting together and trying to write plays and novels in their spare time.

All the same, the New Testament, without going into details, gives us a pretty clear hint of what

a fully Christian society would be like. Perhaps it gives us more than we can take. It tells us that

there are to be no passengers or parasites: if man does not work, he ought not to eat. Every one is

to work with his own hands, and what is more, every one's work is to produce something good:

there will be no manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to

buy them. And there is to be no "swank" or "side," no putting on airs. To that extent a Christian

society would be what we now call Leftist. On the other hand, it is always insisting on

obedience-obedience (and outward marks of respect) from all of us to properly appointed

magistrates, from children to parents, and (I am afraid this is going to be very unpopular) from

wives to husbands. Thirdly, it is to be a cheerful society: full of singing and rejoicing, and

regarding worry or anxiety as wrong. Courtesy is one of the Christian virtues; and the New

Testament hates what it calls "busybodies."

If there were such a society in existence and you or I visited it, I think we should come away

with a curious impression. We should feel that its economic life was very socialistic and, in that

sense, "advanced," but that its family life and its code of manners were rather old-fashioned-

perhaps even ceremonious and aristocratic. Each of us would like some bits of it, but I am afraid

very few of us would like the whole thing. That is just what one would expect if Christianity is

the total plan for the human machine. We have all departed from that total plan in different ways,

and each of us wants to make out that his own modification of the original plan is the plan itself.

You will find this again and again about anything that is really Christian: every one is attracted

by bits of it and wants to pick out those bits and leave the rest. That is why we do not get much

further: and that is why people who are fighting for quite opposite things can both say they are

fighting for Christianity.

Now another point. There is one bit of advice given to us by the ancient heathen Greeks, and by

the Jews in the Old Testament, and by the great Christian teachers of the Middle Ages, which the

modern economic system has completely disobeyed. All these people told us not to lend money

at interest: and lending money at interest-what we call investment-is the basis of our whole

system. Now it may not absolutely follow that we are wrong. Some people say that when Moses

and Aristotle and the Christians agreed in forbidding interest (or "usury" as they called it), they

could not foresee the joint stock company, and were only dunking of the private moneylender,

and that, therefore, we need not bother about what they said. That is a question I cannot decide

on. I am not an economist and I simply do not know whether the investment system is

responsible for the state we are in or not This is where we want the Christian economist But I

should not have been honest if I had not told you that three great civilisations had agreed (or so it

seems at first sight) in condemning the very thing on which we have based our whole life.

One more point and I am done. In the passage where the New Testament says that every one

must work, it gives as a reason "in order that he may have something to give to those in need."

Charity-giving to the poor-is an essential part of Christian morality: in the frightening parable of

the sheep and the goats it seems to be the point on which everything turns. Some people

nowadays say that charity ought to be unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we

ought to be producing a society in which there were no poor to give to. They may be quite right

in saying that we ought to produce that kind of society. But if anyone thinks that, as a

consequence, you can stop giving in the meantime, then he has parted company with all

Christian morality. I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the

only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts,

luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as

our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us,

I should say they are too small There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do

because our charitable expenditure excludes them. I am speaking now of "charities" in the

common way. Particular cases of distress among your own relatives, friends, neighbours or

employees, which God, as it were, forces upon your notice, may demand much more: even to the

crippling and endangering of your own position. For many of us the great obstacle to charity lies

not in our luxurious living or desire for more money, but in our fear-fear of insecurity. This must

often be recognised as a temptation. Sometimes our pride also hinders our charity; we are

tempted to spend more than we ought on the showy forms of generosity (tipping, hospitality) and

less than we ought on those who really need our help.

And now, before I end, I am going to venture on a guess as to how this section has affected any

who have read it My guess is that there are some Leftist people among them who are very angry

that it has not gone further in that direction, and some people of an opposite sort who are angry

because they think it has gone much too far. If so, that brings us right up against the real snag in

all this drawing up of blueprints for a Christian society. Most of us are not really approaching the

subject in order to find out what Christianity says: we are approaching it in the hope of finding

support from Christianity for the views of our own party. We are looking for an ally where we

are offered either a Master or-a Judge. I am just the same. There are bits in this section that I

wanted to leave out. And that is why nothing whatever is going to come of such talks unless we

go a much longer way round. A Christian society is not going to arrive until most of us really

want it: and we are not going to want it until we become fully Christian. I may repeat "Do as you

would be done by" till I am black in the face, but I cannot really carry it out till I love my

neighbour as myself: and I cannot learn to love my neighbour as myself till I learn to love God:

and I cannot learn to love God except by learning to obey Him. And so, as I warned you, we are

driven on to something more inward -driven on from social matters to religious matters. For the

longest way round is the shortest way home.

4. Morality and Psychoanalysis

I have said that we should never get a Christian society unless most of us became Christian

individuals. That does not mean, of course, that we can put off doing anything about society until

some imaginary date in the far future. It means that we must begin both jobs at once-(1) the job

of seeing how "Do as you would be done by" can be applied in detail to modern society, and (2)

the job of becoming the sort of people who really would apply it if we saw how. I now want to

begin considering what the Christian idea of a good man is-the Christian specification for the

human machine.

Before I come down to details there are two more general points I should like to make. First of

all, since Christian morality claims to be a technique for putting the human machine right, I think

you would like to know how it is related to another technique which seems to make a similar

claim-namely, psychoanalysis.

Now you want to distinguish very clearly between two things: between the actual medical

theories and technique of the psychoanalysts, and the general philosophical view of the world

which Freud and some others have gone on to add to this. The second thing-the philosophy of

Freud-is in direct contradiction to Christianity: and also in direct contradiction to the other great

psychologist, Jung. And furthermore, when Freud is talking about how to cure neurotics he is

speaking as a specialist on his own subject, but when he goes on to talk general philosophy he is

speaking as an amateur. It is therefore quite sensible to attend to him with respect in the one case

and not in the other-and that is what I do. I am all the readier to do it because I have found that

when he is talking off his own subject and on a subject I do know something about (namely,

languages) he is very ignorant. But psychoanalysis itself, apart from all the philosophical

additions that Freud and others have made to it, is not in the least contradictory to Christianity.

Its technique overlaps with Christian morality at some points and it would not be a bad thing if

every parson knew something about it: but it does not run the same course all the way, for the

two techniques are doing rather different things.

When a man makes a moral choice two things are involved. One is the act of choosing. The other

is the various feelings, impulses and so on which his psychological outfit presents him with, and

which are the raw material of his choice. Now this raw material may be of two kinds. Either it

may be what we would call normal: it may consist of the sort of feelings that are common to all

men. Or else it may consist of quite unnatural feelings due to things that have gone wrong in his

subconscious. Thus fear of things that are really dangerous would be an example of the first

kind: an irrational fear of cats or spiders would be an example of the second kind. The desire of a

man for a woman would be of the first kind: the perverted desire of a man for a man would be of

the second. Now what psychoanalysis undertakes to do is to remove the abnormal feelings, that

is, to give the man better raw material for his acts of choice: morality is concerned with the acts

of choice themselves.

Put it this way. Imagine three men who go to war. One has the ordinary natural fear of danger

that any man has and he subdues it by moral effort and becomes a brave man. Let us suppose that

the other two have, as a result of things in their sub-consciousness, exaggerated, irrational fears,

which no amount of moral effort can do anything about. Now suppose that a psychoanalyst

comes along and cures these two: that is, he puts them both back in the position of the first man.

Well it is just then that the psychoanalytical problem is over and the moral problem begins.

Because, now that they are cured, these two men might take quite different lines. The first might

say, "Thank goodness I've got rid of all those doodahs. Now at last I can do what I always

wanted to do-my duty to the cause of freedom." But the other might say, "Well, I'm very glad

that I now feel moderately cool under fire, but, of course, that doesn't alter the fact that I'm still

jolly well determined to look after Number One and let the other chap do the dangerous job

whenever I can. Indeed one of the good things about feeling less frightened is that I can now

look after myself much more efficiently and can be much cleverer at hiding the fact from the

others." Now this difference is a purely moral one and psychoanalysis cannot do anything about

it. However much you improve the man's raw material, you have still got something else: the

real, free choice of the man, on the material presented to him, either to put his own advantage

first or to put it last And this$ free choice is the only thing that morality is concerned with.

The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but

to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their

external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a

pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite

possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in

winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is

the right thing, does some tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have

committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's

eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.

It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact,

have made so little use of a good heredity and a good upbringing that we are really worse than

those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had

been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the

power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge.

We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not

judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's

psychological make-up is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him,

and the real central man. the thing that chose, that made the best or the worst out of this material,

will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due

to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to

complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first tune, see every one as he

really was. There will be surprises.

And that leads on to my second point. People often think of Christian morality as a kind of

bargain in which God says, "If you keep a lot of rules I'll reward you, and if you don't I'll do the

other thing." I do not think that is the best way of looking at it. I would much rather say that

every time you make a choice you are turning the central part of you, the part of you that

chooses, into something a little different from what it was before. And taking your life as a

whole, with all your innumerable choices, all your life long you are slowly turning this central

thing either into a heavenly creature or into a hellish creature: either into a creature that is in

harmony with God, and with other creatures, and with itself, or else into one that is in a state of

war and hatred with God, and with its fellow-creatures, and with itself. To be the one kind of

creature is heaven: that is, it is joy and peace and knowledge and power. To be the other means

madness, horror, idiocy, rage, impotence, and eternal loneliness. Each of us at each moment is

progressing to the one state or the other.

That explains what always used to puzzle me about Christian writers; they seem to be so very

strict at one moment and so very free and easy at another. They talk about mere sins of thought

as if they were immensely important: and then they talk about the most frightful murders and

treacheries as if you had only got to repent and all would be forgiven. But I have come to see that

they are right. What they are always thinking of is the mark which the action leaves on that tiny

central self which no one sees in this life but which each of us will have to endure-or enjoy-for

ever. One man may be so placed that his anger sheds the blood of thousands, and another so

placed that however angry he gets he will only be laughed at. But the little mark on the soul may

be much the same in both. Each has done something to himself which, unless he repents, will

make it harder for him to keep out of the rage next time he is tempted, and will make the rage

worse when he does fall into it. Each of them, if he seriously turns to God, can have that twist in

the central man straightened out again: each is, in the long run, doomed if he will not. The

bigness or smallness of the thing, seen from the outside, is not what really matters.

One last point. Remember that, as I said, the right direction leads not only to peace but to

knowledge. When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is

still left in him. When a man is getting worse, he understands his own badness less and less. A

moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This

is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping.

You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making

them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober,

not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know

about either.

5. Sexual Morality

We must now consider Christian morality as regards sex, what Christians call the virtue of

chastity. The Christian rule of chastity must not be confused with the social rule of "modesty" (in

one sense of that word); i.e. propriety, or decency. The social rule of propriety lays down how

much of the human body should be displayed and what subjects can be referred to, and in what

words, according to the customs of a given social circle. Thus, while the rule of chastity is the

same for all Christians at all times, the rule of propriety changes. A girl in the Pacific islands

wearing hardly any clothes and a Victorian lady completely covered in clothes might both be

equally "modest," proper, or decent, according to the standards of their own societies: and both,

for all we could tell by their dress, might be equally chaste (or equally unchaste). Some of the

language which chaste women used in Shakespeare's time would have been used in the