"C.S.Lewis. Mere christianity " - читать интересную книгу автора

Hope
Faith
Faith
BOOK 4. BEYOND PERSONALITY: OR FIRST STEPS IN THE DOCTRINE OF THE
TRINITY
Making and Begetting
The Three-Personal God
Time and Beyond Time
Good Infection
The Obstinate Toy Soldiers
Two Notes
Let's Pretend
Is Christianity Hard or Easy?
Counting the Cost
Nice People or New Men
The New Men




Book One
RIGHT AND WRONG AS A CLUE TO THE MEANING OF THE UNIVERSE
The Law of Human Nature

Every one has heard people quarrelling. Sometimes it sounds funny and
sometimes it sounds merely unpleasant; but however it sounds, I believe we
can learn something very important from listening to the kind of things they
say. They say things like this: 'How'd you like it if anyone did the same to
you?' - 'That's my seat, I was there first' - 'Leave him alone, he isn't
doing you any harm' - 'Why should you shove in first?' - 'Give me a bit of
your orange, I gave you a bit of mine' - 'Come on, you promised.' People say
things like that every day, educated people as well as uneducated, and
children as well as grown-ups.
Now what interests me about all these remarks is that the man who makes
them is not merely saying that the other man's behaviour does not happen to
please him. He is appealing to some kind of standard of behaviour which he
expects the other man to know about. And the other man very seldom replies:
'To hell with your standard.' Nearly always he tries to make out that what
he has been doing does not really go against the standard, or that if it
does there is some special excuse. He pretends there is some special reason
in this particular case why the person who took the seat first should not
keep it, or that things were quite different when he was given the bit of
orange, or that something has turned up which lets him off keeping his
promise. It looks, in fact, very much as if both parties had in mind some
kind of Law or Rule of fair play or decent behaviour or morality or whatever
you like to call it, about whichthey really agreed. And they have. If they
had not, they might, of course, fight like animals, but they could not
quarrel in the human sense of the word. Quarrelling means trying to show
that the other man is in the wrong. And there would be no sense in trying to
do that unless you and he had some sort of agreement as to what Right and