"C.S.Lewis "George MacDonald. An Antology" (англ.)" - читать интересную книгу автора

not come the less that he fears it or denies it. Escape is hopeless. For
Love is inexorable. Our God is a consuming fire. He shall not come out till
he has paid the uttermost farthing.

[ 10 ] The Word
But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim
to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus,
the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in
whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save
as leading to Him.

[ 11 ] I Knew a Child
I knew a child who believed she had committed the sin against the Holy
Ghost, because she had, in her toilette, made an improper use of a pin. Dare
not to rebuke me for adducing the diseased fancy of a child in a weighty
matter of theology. "Despise not one of these little ones." Would the
theologians were as near the truth in such matters as the children. Diseased
fancy! The child knew, and was conscious that she knew, that she was doing
wrong because she had been forbidden. There was rational ground for her
fear. . . . He would not have told her she was silly, and "never to mind."
Child as she was, might He not have said to her, "I do not condemn thee: and
go and sin no more"?

[12] Spiritual Murder
It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to
forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is
the heart's choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood
over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the
idea of the hated.

[ 13 ] Impossibilities
No man who will not forgive his neighbor, can believe that God is
willing, yea wanting, to forgive him.... If God said, "I forgive you" to a
man who hated his brother, and if (as impossible) that voice of forgiveness
should reach the man, what would it mean to him? How much would the man
interpret it? Would it not mean to him "You may go on hating. I do not mind
it. You have had great provocation and are justified in your hate"? No doubt
God takes what wrong there is, and what provocation there is, into the
account: but the more provocation, the more excuse that can be urged for the
hate, the more reason, if possible, that the hater should be delivered from
the hell of his hate. . . . The man would think, not that God loved the
sinner, but that he forgave the sin, which God never does [i.e. What is
usually called "forgiving the sin" means forgiving the sinner and destroying
the sin]. Every sin meets with its due fate-inexorable expulsion from the
paradise of God's Humanity. He loves the sinner so much that He cannot
forgive him in any other way than by banishing from his bosom the demon that
possesses him.

[ 14 ] Truth is Truth
Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam.