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

the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of
issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe.

[ 50 ] What Cannot Be Loved
But how can we love a man or a woman who ... is mean, unlovely,
carping, uncertain, self-righteous, self-seeking, and self-admiring?-who can
even sneer, the most inhuman of human faults, far worse in its essence than
mere murder? These things cannot be loved. The best man hates them most; the
worst man cannot love them. But are these the man? . . . Lies there not
within the man and the woman a divine element of brotherhood, of sisterhood,
a something lovely and lovable- slowly fading, it may be-dying away under
the fierce heat of vile passions, or the yet more fearful cold of sepulchral
selfishness, but there? ... It is the very presence of this fading humanity
that makes it possible for us to hate. If it were an animal only, and not a
man or a woman, that did us hurt, we should not hate: we should only kill.

[ 51 ] Love and Justice
Man is not made for justice from his fellow, but for love, which is
greater than justice, and by including supersedes justice. Mere justice is
an impossibility, a fiction of analysis.... Justice to be justice must be
much more than justice. Love is the law of our condition, without which we
can no more render justice than a man can keep a straight line, walking in
the dark.

[ 52 ] The Body
It is by the body that we come into contact with Nature, with our
fellowmen, with all their revelations to us. It is through the body that we
receive all the lessons of passion, of suffering, of love, of beauty, of
science. It is through the body that we are both trained outward from
ourselves, and driven inward into our deepest selves to find God. There is
glory and might in this vital evanescence, this slow glacierlike flow of
clothing and revealing matter, this ever uptossed rainbow of tangible
humanity. It is no less of God's making than the spirit that is clothed
therein.

[ 53 ] Goodness
The Father was all in all to the Son, and the Son no more thought of
His own goodness than an honest man thinks of his honesty. When the good man
sees goodness, he thinks of his own evil: Jesus had no evil to think of, but
neither does He think of His goodness: He delights in His Father's. "Why
callest thou Me good?"

[ 54 ] Christ's Disregards
The Lord cared neither for isolated truth nor for orphaned deed. It was
truth in the inward parts, it was the good heart, the mother of good deeds,
He cherished. ... It was good men He cared about, not notions of good
things, or even good actions, save as the outcome of life, save as the
bodies in which the primary live actions of love and will in the soul took
shape and came forth.