The sermon and the lunch (Part 3)

"It is there that we can fling aside the disguises and be ourselves." These words, in the Vicar’s mouth, were only too true and he showed at the lunch table what they meant. Outside his own house he behaves with ordinary courtesy. He would not have interrupted any other young man as he interrupted his son. He would not, in any other society, have talked confident nonsense about subjects of which he was totally ignorant: or, if he had, he would have accepted correction with good temper. In fact, he values home as the place where he can ‘be himself’ in the sense of trampling on all the restraints which civilized humanity has found indispensable for tolerable social intercourse. And this, I think, is very common. What chiefly distinguishes domestic from public conversation is surely very often simply its downright rudeness. What distinguishes domestic behaviour is often its selfishness, slovenliness, incivility even brutality. And it will often happen that those who praise home life most loudly are the worst offenders in this respect: they praise it — they are always glad to get home, hate the outer world, can’t stand visitors, can’t be bothered meeting people, etc. — because the freedoms in which they indulge themselves at home have ended by making them unfit for civilized society. If they practised elsewhere the only behaviour they now find ‘natural’ they would simply be knocked clown.

C.S. Lewis, "The Sermon and The Lunch" (1945) included in God in the Dock (Eerdmans, 1970) 285-286.

Technorati Tags: C.S. Lewis,God in the Dock,preaching,sermons