The Only Thing That Satisfies

C. S. Lewis:

He claims all, because He is love and must bless. He cannot bless us unless He has us. When we try to keep within us an area that is our won, we try to keep an area of death. Therefore, in love, He claims all. There's no bargaining with Him.

That is, I take it, the meaning of all those sayings that alarm me most. . . . [William] Law, in his cool, terrible voice, said . . . 'If you have not chosen the Kingdom of God, it will make in the end no difference what you have chosen instead.' Those are hard words to take. Will it really make no difference whether it was women or patriotism, cocaine or art, whisky or a seat in the Cabinet, money or science? Well, surely no difference that matters. We shall have missed the end for which we are formed and rejected the only thing that satisfies.

Does it matter to a man dying in a desert by which choice of route he missed the only well?

--'A Slip of the Tongue,' in The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (Touchstone, 1975), 141-42