RED HAIR

'He gnashed a teeth or two. He was a red-headed chap, and my experience of the red-headed is that you can always expect high blood pressure from them in times of stress. The first Queen Elizabeth had red hair, and look what she did to Mary Queen of Scots.'

PG Wodehouse, Aunts Aren't Gentlemen, p.8.

GRACE

'Your worse days are never so bad that you are beyond the reach of God's grace. And your best days are never so good that you are beyond the need of God's grace.'

Jerry Bridges in Andrew Farmer, The Rich Single Life, p.25.

SINGLENESS

'Prize the advantages you enjoy: know the value of them. Esteem them as highly when you have them, as others do when they have lost them. Pray constantly and fervently for this very thing: that God would teach you to set a due value on them. And let it be a matter of daily thanksgiving to God, that he has made you a partaker of these benefits. Indeed, the more full and explicit you are herein, the more sensible you will be of the cause you have to be thankful; the more lively conviction you will have of the greatness of the blessing.'

John Wesley in Andrew Farmer, The Rich Single Life, p.11.

THE BIBLE

'Precious Bible! what a treasure
Does the Word of God afford!
All I want for life or pleasure
Food and medicine, shield and sword;
Let the world account me poor
Christ and this, I need no more.'
John Newton in Christoper Ash, Bible Delight, p.87.

LIBERALS

'I really think that in our days it is the 'undogmatic' & 'liberal' people who call themselves Christians that are the most arrogant & intolerant. I expect justice & even courtesy from many Atheists ... from Modernists, I have come to take bitterness and rancour as a matter of course.'

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.), The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol III, p.112.

REAL CHILDREN

'I'm glad you liked 'The Lion'. A number of mothers, and still more, schoolmistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well. But the real children like it, and I am astonished how some very young ones seem to understand it. I think it frightens some adults, but very few children ...'

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.), The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol III, p.93.

DOUBT

'I do get that sudden feeling that the whole thing is hocus pocus and it now worries me hardly at all. Surely the mechanism is quite simple? Sceptical, incredulous, materialistic ruts have been deeply engraved in out thought, perhaps even in our physical brains by all our earlier lives. At the slightest jerk our thought will flow down those old ruts. And notice when these jerks come. Usually at the precise moment when we might receive Grace. And if you were a devil would you not give the jerk just at these moments? I think that all Christians have found that he is v. active near the altar or on the eve of conversion: worldly anxieties, physical discomforts, lascivious fancies, doubt, are often poured in at such junctures ... But Grace is not frustrated. One gets more by pressing steadily on through these interruptions than on occasions when it all goes smoothly ...'

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.), The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol III, p.93.

HAPPINESS

'It is hard on God really. To how few of us He dare send happiness becuase He knows we will forget Him if He gave us any sort of nice things for the moment ... '

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.), The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol III, p.93.

HAPPINESS

'Indeed the best thing about happiness itself is that it liberates you from thinking about happiness - as the greatest pleasure that money can give us is to make it unecessary to think about money.'

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.), The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol III, p.93.

EDUCATION

' ... Equality of Opportunity in practice means ruthless Competition during those very years which, I can't help feeling, nature meant to be free and frolicsome. Can it be good, from the age of 10 to the age of 23, to be always preparing for an exam, and always knowing that your whole worldly future depends on it: and not only knowing it, but perpetually reminded of it by your parents and masters? Is this the way to breed a nation of people in psychological, moral, and spiritual health? (N.B. Boys are now taught to regard Ambition as a virtue. I think we shall find that up to the XVIIIth Century, and back into Pagan times, all moralists regarded it as a vice and dealt with it accordingly).'

CS Lewis in Walter Hooper (Ed.), The Collected Letters of CS Lewis Vol III, p.17.