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

[ 44 ] The Moral Law
Of what use then is the Law? To lead us to Christ, the Truth-to waken
in our minds a sense of what our deepest nature, the presence, namely, of
God in us, requires of us-to let us know, in part by failure, that the
purest efforts of will of which we are capable cannot lift us up even to the
abstaining from wrong to our neighbor.

[ 45 ] The Same
In order to fulfill the commonest law ... we must rise into a loftier
region altogether, a region that is above law, because it is spirit and life
and makes the law.

[ 46 ] Upward toward the Center
"But how," says a man, who is willing to recognize the universal
neighborhood, but finds himself unable to fulfill the bare law toward the
woman even whom he loves best-"How am I then to rise into that higher
region, that empyrean of love?" And, beginning straightaway to try to love
his neighbor, he finds that the empyrean of which he spoke is no more to be
reached in itself than the law was to be reached in itself. As he cannot
keep the law without first rising into the love of his neighbor, so he
cannot love his neighbor without first rising higher still. The whole system
of the universe works upon this law-the driving of things upward toward the
center. The man who will love his neighbor can do so by no immediately
operative exercise of the will. It is the man fulfilled of God from whom he
came and by whom he is, who alone can as himself love his neighbor who came
from God too and is by God too. The mystery of individuality and consequent
relation is deep as the beginnings of humanity, and the questions thence
arising can be solved only by him who has, practically at least, solved the
holy necessities resulting from his origin. In God alone can man meet man.
In Him alone the converging lines of existence touch and cross not. When the
mind of Christ, the life of the Head, courses through that atom which the
man is of the slowly revivifying body, when he is alive too, then the love
of the brothers is there as conscious life. ... It is possible to love our
neighbor as ourselves. Our Lord never spoke hyperbolically.

[ 47 ] No One Loves Because He Sees Why
Where a man does not love, the not-loving must seem rational. For no
one loves because he sees why, but because he loves. No human reason can be
given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence. For reasons
are always from above downward.

[ 48 ] My Neighbor
A man must not choose his neighbor: he must take the neighbor that God
sends him. . . . The neighbor is just the man who is next to you at the
moment, the man with whom any business has brought you into contact.

[ 49 ] The Same
The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self,
where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescences out of