C.S Lewis?

But to tell me that I am to live for ever, and that there is no God! For anything any man knows who does not believe in a God it may be so. He cannot tell with certainty that he is going to die forever because he sees no more of those that have gone before. Why should not they go on to some other sphere as they came into this one? Without any warning or any choice, they do not know until they find themselves here. Why should it not be so in another state of existence? But to find yourselves there without a God! There is no use praying to be killed, because there is no God to hear your prayer. You can no more annihilate yourselves than make yourselves; the whole thing would be utter misery, especially when the man has such ideas that he is satisfied with himself. But what is to be done with you and me, who cannot finish ourselves? Poor creatures! we feel that if God is like us, He had better cease and we had better all cease; but if we see He is like us–only He is perfect, absolute in grandeur and loveliness, ah then, “I shall get rid of this bad in me–this poor, mean stuff in me, and I shall become glorious, true, and excellent like Him.” That is worth living for; nothing else is; it is for that that Christ tells us to put confidence in Him and obey His word, and we shall see the Father. “He that heareth and openeth the door, I will come in, sit down with him, and sup with him and he with Me.” When God is seated at the very fireside of our hearts, then there is no more doubt. I say, friends, it is a good thing that you should have doubt until you see that nothing less than that will do, and until you come to desire that, and to turn your judgments, your thought, and feeling in that direction.

Do you hope for anything, friends? Thank God, that comes from you faith. No man that has not faith can hope. But do not think the world is going all to the devil. There is a better and stronger faith coming. It was a great thing that this foolish, actionless kind of religion should vanish, and that a simple, obedient, hoping, trusting life should takes its place. The world is not worse than it was. Many even of those that do not believe in God have faith towards their neighbour. Even those who do not believe, on the whole are better in this century than those that did not believe in the last. Only, we are a set of foolish men and women who simply talk and nothing else–neither believe nor disbelieve–who have neither the soul nor the heart to be in earnest about anything. God has a hold upon them too, and He has but to place His hand upon them to make them feel it.

You have no business to set yourselves up for an example; you have to be and to do, and that is letting the light shine. It ought not to be possible to mistake a Christian for a man of the world.

Christ is God, the all-in-all, or nothing at all.

I would have you, then, friends, remember that faith is the trying of the thing that you do not see, and that you cannot be sure about, a thing that you do not see and which, not seeing, you have doubt about, you can yet try–that is faith; and if you are honest, that will be a great opportunity and a great help to you; it will start a fresh faith which you have not thought of before, and give your life a new start. Faith is intended to put to the test the unseen world of truth, love, law, hope, redemption. God grant us all faith enough to carry on from point to point till the faith shall vanish into light, and we have never to think about faith more, nor to think about Church more, nor the Bible more, nor prayer more, but our whole being shall be a delighted consciousness of the presence of God and His Christ.

God will not give us little things to spoil our appetite for great things. God will never be content until we are one with Him as He is one with Christ;