Three sermons and two talks delivered by Lewis during and shortly after the Second World War. Written in a conversational style appropriate to the circumstances of their creation, but full of substance, as one expects from Professor Lewis. - Faded Page Excerpt from the Inner Ring: Boris now clearly understood—what he had already guessed—that side by side with the system of discipline and subordination which were laid down in the Army Regulations, there existed a different and more real system—the system which compelled a tightly laced general with a purple face to wait respectfully for his turn while a mere captain like Prince Andrey chatted with a mere second lieutenant like Boris. Boris decided at once that he would be guided not by the official system but by this other unwritten system... In the passage I have just read from Tolstoy, the young second lieutenant Boris Dubretskoi discovers that there exist in the army two different systems or hierarchies. The one is printed in some little red book and anyone can easily read it up. It also remains constant... The other is not printed anywhere. Nor is it even a formally organised secret society with officers and rules which you would be told after you had been admitted. You are never formally and explicitly admitted by anyone. You discover gradually, in almost indefinable ways, that it exists and that you are outside it; and then later, perhaps, that you are inside it... There are no formal admissions or expulsions. People think they are in it after they have in fact been pushed out of it, or before they have been allowed in: this provides great amusement for those who are really inside... My main purpose in this address is simply to convince you that this desire is one of the great permanent mainsprings of human action. It is one of the factors which go to make up the world as we know it—this whole pell-mell of struggle, competition, confusion, graft, disappointment and advertisement, and if it is one of the permanent mainsprings then you may be quite sure of this. Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care. That will be the natural thing—the life that will come to you of its own accord. Any other kind of life, if you lead it, will be the result of conscious and continuous effort. If you do nothing about it, if you drift with the stream, you will in fact be an “inner ringer.” I don’t say you’ll be a successful one; that’s as may be. But whether by pining and moping outside Rings that you can never enter, or by passing triumphantly further and further in—one way or the other you will be that kind of man. The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts unless you break it. But if you break it, a surprising result will follow. If in your working hours you make the work your end, you will presently find yourself all unawares inside the only circle in your profession that really matters. -The Inner Ring In his famous sermon "The Weight of Glory" Lewis explores the Christian concept of heavenly glory and argues that it consists of two qualities: (1) a welcoming acceptance and acknowledgment by God ("Well done, thou good and faithful servant") and (2) a brightness or luminosity of the glorified bodies of the saved. The "weight" or burden of glory, according to Lewis, consists in the realization that the redeemed shall be approved by God and "delighted in as an artist delights in his work or a father in a son." The work is also notable for its critique of Christian pacifism, its defense of learning as a Christian vocation, its attack on materialistic reductionism, and its brief presentations of two of Lewis's most famous apologetical arguments, the argument from desire and the argument from reason. - Wikipedia