Fine scholar though he was, he was an even better teacher; and it may truly be said of him... that in turning men’s minds to the Middle Ages he ‘stimulated their mental thirst... silently indoctrinating them with nobler ideas, which might afterwards be appealed to as first principles’.

His conversion to Christianity seems to have come about largely by thinking... It did not come by sudden intuition, or overwhelming vision, or even by the more usual path of conviction of sin calling for repentance and atonement.

What a pity it is that by such superfluous unrealities he should furnish the public with excuses to evade the overwhelming realism of his moral theology!

When under suffering we see good men go to pieces we do not witness the failure of a moral discipline to take effect; we witness the advance of death where death comes by inches.

Is romantic yearning an appetite for [H]eaven, or is it the ultimate refinement of covetousness?

What will has caused, will must be brought to correct.

He was never quite at home in what we may call our post-positivist era

Muddled minds read him, and found themselves moving with delight in a world of clarity.

As he claimed the right to enjoy the literature of any period for the joy that was in it, so he claimed the liberty to profit from the insights of every generation open to his study. He would have been ashamed to know nothing of what was being said, written or done in his own day; but he felt under no obligation to find it better than the products of previous time, and especially than those which had passed the sieve of old oblivion.

Lewis was an apologist from temper, from conviction, and from modesty. From temper, for he loved argument. From conviction, being traditionally orthodox. From modesty, because he laid no claim either to the learning which would have made him a theologian or to the grace which would have made him a spiritual guide.