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PROLOGUE

Born in Ireland in 1898, C S Leas educated at Malvern College for a year and then privately He gained a triple first at Oxford and was a Fellow and Tutor at Magdalen College 1925-54 In 1954 he became Professor of Mediaeval and Renaissance Literature at Ca and popular lecturer and had a lasting influence on his pupils

C S Leas for many years an atheist, and described his conversion in Surprised by Joy: 'In the Trinity Terave in, and admitted that God was Godperhaps the land' It was this experience that helped hiness to accept religion, and, as a Christian writer, gifted with an exceptionally brilliant and logical mind and a lucid, lively style, he ithout peer The Problem of Pain, The Screwtape Letters, Mere Christianity, The Four Loves and the posthumous Prayer: Letters to Malcol works He also wrote sohtful books for children and some science fiction, besides many works of literary criticism His works are known to millions of people all over the world in translation He died on 22nd November, 1963, at his home in Oxford

PREFACE

THE CONTENTS of this book were first given on the air, and then published in three separate parts as Broadcast Talks (1942), Christian Behaviour 0943), and Beyond Personality (1944) In the printed versions I made a few additions to what I had said at the microphone, but otherwise left the text much as it had been A 'talk' on the radio should, I think, be as like real talk as possible, and should not sound like an essay being read aloud In my talks I had therefore used all the contractions and colloquialisms I ordinarily use in conversation In the printed version I reproduced this, putting don't and we've for do not and we have And whereever, in the talks, I had made the importance of a word clear by the emphasis of my voice, I printed it in italics I am now inclined to think that this was aand the art of writing A talker ought to use variations of voice for emphasis because his ht not to use italics for the sa out the key words and ought to use them In this edition I have expanded the contractions and replacedof the sentences in which they occurred: but without altering, I hope, the 'popular' or 'fa intended I have also added and deleted where I thought I understood any part of o or where I knew that the original version had been misunderstood by others

The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian 'denoht to becolican, a Methodist, a Presbyterian, or a Roman Catholic This oiven the order is alphabetical) There is no mystery about my own position I aland, not especially 'high', nor especially 'low', nor especially anything else But in this book I a to convert anyone to ht that the best, perhaps the only, service I could do for hbours was to explain and defend the belief that has been common to nearly all Christians at all ti this In the first place, the questions which divide Christians froy or even of ecclesiastical history, which ought never to be treated except by real experts I should have been out of my depth in such waters: more in need of help myself than able to help others And secondly, I think we must admit that the discussion of these disputed points has no tendency at all to bring an outsider into the Christian fold So long as rite and talk about the any Christian communion than to draw him into our own Our divisions should never be discussed except in the presence of those who have already come to believe that there is one God and that Jesus Christ is His only Son Finally, I got the impression that far ed in such controversial matters than in the defence of what Baxter calls 'ht I could serve best was also the part that seemed to be thinnest And to it I naturally went

So far as I know, these were lad if people would not draw fanciful inferences from my silence on certain disputed matters

For exa on the fence Sometimes I am There are questions at issue between Christians to which I do not think we have been told the answer There are some to which I may never know the answer: if I asked theht (for all I know) be answered as a far greater questioner was answered: 'What is that to thee? Follow thou Me' But there are other questions as to which I a For I aion', but to expound 'mere' Christianity, which is what it is and hat it was long before I was born and whether I like it or not

Some people draarranted conclusions froin Mary than is involved in asserting the Virgin Birth of Christ But surelyso is obvious? To say ions And there is no controversy between Christians which needs to be so delicately touched as this The Roman Catholic beliefs on that subject are held not only with the ordinary fervour that attaches to all sincere religious belief, but (very naturally) with the peculiar and, as it were, chivalrous sensibility that a man feels when the honour of his mother or his beloved is at stake It is very difficult so to dissent from them that you will not appear to them a cad as well as a heretic And contrariwise, the opposed Protestant beliefs on this subject call forth feelings which go down to the very roots of all Monotheism whatever To radical Protestants it seems that the distinction between Creator and creature (however holy) is iain Hence it is hard so to dissent fro worse than a heretic - a Pagan If any topic could be relied upon to wreck a book about 'mere' Christianity - if any topicfor those who do not yet believe that the Virgin's son is God - surely this is it

Oddly enough, you cannot even conclude, from my silence on disputed points, either that I think them important or that I think them unimportant For this is itself one of the disputed points One of the things Christians are disagreed about is the ireements When two Christians of' different deno before one asks whether such-and-such a point 'really matters' and the other replies 'Matter? Why, it's absolutely essential'

All this is said si to write not in the least to conceal or evade responsibility for my own beliefs About those, as I said before, there is no secret To quote Uncle Toby: 'They are written in the Common-Prayer Book'

The danger clearly was that I should put forward as co that was peculiar to the Church of England or (worse still) to inal script of what is now Book II to four clergylican, Methodist, Presbyterian, Ro for their criticish about Faith, and the Roone rather too far about the comparative unimportance of theories in explanation of the Atonereed I did not have the reh differencesChristians, these would be differences between individuals or schools of thought, not between denominations

So far as I can judge from reviews and from the numerous letters written to me, the book, however faulty in other respects, did at least succeed in presenting an agreed, or common, or central, or 'mere' Christianity In that way itthe view that, if we oue and bloodless HCF The HCF turns out to be soent; divided from all non-Christian beliefs by a chasm to which the worst divisions inside Christendom are not really comparable at all If I have not directly helped the cause of reunion, I have perhaps ht to be reunited Certainly I have icum from convinced members of communions different from my own Hostility has come land or without it: men not exactly obedient to any co It is at her centre, where her truest children dwell, that each communion is really closest to every other in spirit, if' not in doctrine And this suggests that at the centre of each there is a soencies of belief, all differences of temperament, all memories of mutual persecution, speaks with the same voice