Mere Christianity

We all have some basic instincts instilled within us. To eat, and sleep, and breathe just to name a few. But there is another set of instincts that we have. These are based on morality. There is always the instinct of self preservation. You always want to do whats best for you. Whatever will keep you safe and out of harms way. There is also the other instinct telling you that you need to reach out and help, even if that means you put yourself in danger. Think of a swimmer drowning; you have two instincts right? The first is to call for help. You surely can't go out to save them, because you yourself could drown. Or there is the second telling you that you have to go save them. Now which one do you listen to? That is where morality kicks in. Your brain tells you to do the first but morality more often than not tells you that the more difficult thing is the right thing to do. Lewis compares our set of choices to a piano. He says that "You might as well say that the sheet of music which tells you, at a given moment, to play one note on the piano and not another, is itself one of the notes on the keyboard. The Moral Law tells us the tune we have to play: our instincts are merely the keys."

Although one instinct may be right for a certain situation though, it is not always the correct choice. Lewis used a great line telling us a bit about this. Using his piano analogy again he says "Think once again of a piano. It has not got two kind of notes on it, the 'right' notes and the 'wrong' ones. Every single note is right at one time and wrong at another. The Moral Law is not any one instinct or any set of instincts: it is something which makes a kind of tune (the tune we call goodness or right conduct) by directing the instincts."