【舒心小语】17. 疯子？骗子？魔鬼？--纪念C.S.Lewis逝世51周年

If you look for truth, you may find comfortin the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.寻找真理，你最终或可以找到安慰；寻找安慰，你既得不到安慰，也得不到真理，只会在开始阶段得到一些泡沫和不实际的思想，和最终彻底的失望。If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be without meaning.如果整个宇宙没有意义，我们就从来不会发现它没有意义。正如，如果这宇宙没有光，那生物也不会有眼睛，我们也察觉不出黑暗，而黑暗本身根本也没有任何意义。If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.如果我们发现自己内心有一个渴望，不是这世间所能满足的，最可能的解释是，我们的存在是为了另一世界。I didn’t go to religion to make me happy. I always knew a bottle of Port would do that. If you want a religion to make you feel really comfortable, I certainly don’t recommend Christianity.我寻找宗教，并不是因为它能让我快乐。我向来知道，一瓶酒已经能够让我开心。如果你想寻找一个令自己感觉舒服的宗教，那么我肯定不会推荐基督教。Man is not the centre. God does not exist for the sake of man. Man does not exist for his own sake.人不是宇宙的中心。上帝不是为了人而存在，人也不是为了自己而存在。I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: I’m ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don’t accept his claim to be God. That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be alunatic — on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg — or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God, but let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.我在这里试图让人避免说一些对耶稣的认识缺乏智慧的话，尽管别人经常这样说：”我愿意承认耶稣是一位伟大的道德教师，但我不能接受他自以为是上帝的宣称。”这样的话不应该出自我们的口。一个人，若他只是凡人，却说出像耶稣说的那些话，决不可能是一个伟大的道德教师。要么，他是个疯子，就像说自己是个卤蛋的人那样；要不然，他就是来自地狱的魔鬼。你得自己作决定，要么，相信这耶稣在当时和现在都是上帝的儿子；要不然，就得相信这人是个疯子，或是比疯子更坏的东西。你可以当他是个笨蛋，叫他闭嘴；你也可以吐唾沫在他身上，把他当妖魔宰了；你也可以俯伏在他的脚前，称他为主、为上帝。但千万别自作聪明、自以为是地把他当作一位伟大的教师。他没有给我们这样说他的可能性，他根本不容许我们这么做。I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.我相信基督教，正如我相信太阳已经升上来了一样：这并不只是因为我看见了它，而是因为通过它，我看见了一切事物。A cold, self-righteous prig who goesregularly to church may be far nearer to Hell than a prostitute.一个冷漠、自义的道学先生，尽管经常上教堂，他可能比一个妓女更接近地狱。The Christian does not think God will love us because we are good, but that God will make us good because He loves us.”基督徒不认为，因为我们是良善的，所以上帝爱我们；而是因为祂爱我们，他使我们成为良善的。Those that hate goodness are sometime snearer than those that know nothing at all about it and think they have it.那些恨恶良善的人，有时倒比那些对良善一无所知却又自命良善的人，更接近良善。The world does not consist of 100 percent Christians and 100 percent non-Christians. There are people (a great many of them) who are slowly ceasing to be Christians but who still call themselves by that name: some of them are clergymen. There are other people who are slowly becoming Christians though they do not yet call themselves so.这世界并不是由百分百的基督徒和百分百的非基督徒所组成。这当中有人，许许多多称呼自己是基督徒的人，包括一些神职人员，缓慢地不再是基督徒；这当中也有不自认为基督徒的人，却是逐渐地成为基督徒。To be a Christian means to forgive the inexcusable because God has forgiven the inexcusable in you.成为一个基督徒，就是宽恕那不可宽恕的，因为神已经宽恕了你生命里不可宽恕的一切。Education without values, as useful as it is, seems rather to make man a more clever devil.教育若失去了价值观的层次，不管它多么有用，都只能塑造一个更聪明的妖魔。。。。。。。。