If Christianity was something we were making up, of course we could make it easier. But it is not.

We are not merely imperfect creatures who must be improved; we are rebels who must lay down our arms.

The Opposite of Love is not hate, but power

If no set of moral ideas were truer or better than any other, there would be no sense in preferring civilised morality to savage morality.

God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better but like turning a horse into a winged creature.

Friendship (as the ancients saw) can be a school of virtue, but also (as they did not see) a school of vice. It is ambivalent. It makes good men better and bad men worse.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin.