Three Kinds of Men

I really like this website called “Stuff Christians Like”. I don’t understand how that guy can be so funny day after day. Anyway the other day he had an entry where he said that Christians like to pretend to like C.S. Lewis. I know what he means - I definitely have more C.S. Lewis sitting impressively on my bookshelf than I'll actually ever read, because some of it is a little too cerebral for me. But I really do like a lot of it - including Mere Christianity (which is his masterpiece and is actually quite readable), Screwtape Letters, The Four Loves, Chronicles of Narnia, and the essays in God in the Dock and The Weight of Glory. I tend to like the shorter stuff better, and the following is the shortest C.S. Lewis essay I know of - but it packs a lot of wisdom in a short space. It's a somewhat obscure essay of his called "Three Kinds of Men" which is in one of his lesser known collections of essays called "Present Concerns. Here it is in its entirety - hope you enjoy:

Three Kinds of Men by CS Lewis

There are three kinds of people in the world. The first class is of those who live simply for their own sake and pleasure, regarding Man and Nature as so much raw material to be cut up into whatever shape may serve them. In the second class are those who acknowledge some other claim upon them – the will of God, the categorical imperative, or the good of society – and honestly try to pursue their own interests no further than this claim will allow. They try to surrender to the higher claim as much as it demands, like men paying a tax, but hope, like other taxpayers, that what is left over will be enough for them to live on. Their life is divided, like a soldier's or a schoolboy’s life, into time “on parade” and “off parade”, “in school” and “out of school”. But the third class is of those who can say like St Paul that for them “to live is Christ”. These people have got rid of the tiresome business of adjusting the rival claims of Self and God by the simple expedient of rejecting the claims of Self altogether. The old egoistic will has been turned round, reconditioned, and made into a new thing. The will of Christ no longer limits theirs; it is theirs. All their time, in belonging to Him, belongs also to them, for they are His.

And because there are three classes, any merely twofold division of the world into good and bad is disastrous. It overlooks the fact that the members of the second class (to which most of us belong) are always and necessarily unhappy. The tax which moral conscience levies on our desires does not in fact leave us enough to live on. As long as we are in this class we must either feel guilt because we have not paid the tax or penury because we have. The Christian doctrine that there is no “salvation” by works done to the moral law is a fact of daily experience. Back or on we must go. But there is no going on simply by our own efforts. If the new Self, the new Will, does not come at His own good pleasure to be born in us, we cannot produce Him synthetically.

The price of Christ is something, in a way, much easier than moral effort – it is to want Him. It is true that the wanting itself would be beyond our power but for one fact. The world is so built that, to help us desert our own satisfactions, they desert us. War and trouble and finally old age take from us one by one all those things that the natural Self hoped for at its setting out. Begging is our only wisdom, and want in the end makes it easier for us to be beggars. Even on those terms the Mercy will receive us.