Mere Christianity

In this first section of Mere Christianity, Lewis begins by explaining his methods in complying this collection of thoughts as well as telling why he has chosen not to include several topics and issues. In the first chapter, he discusses the Law of Human Nature. Here he proves how all humans are governed by a common sense of morality, in spite of different cultures and customs. As he notes, "Think of a country where people were admired for running away in battle, or where man felt proud of double-crossing all the people who had been kindest to him. You might just as well try to imagine a country where two and two made five."
In Chapter 2, points out some objections that people might have to his points. He has some insight into these types of objections, because he himself wrestled with these things on his path to conversion. He explains several ways to look at to refute the objections being made. After laying a "firm foundation," he moves on in Chapter 3 to the Reality of the Law. Here he talks about how men have the moral law, but do not follow it. Though they ought to be unselfish and fair, they often do not behave in this way. The end of this selection is Chapter 4, which focuses on what lies behind the Law. Here, Lewis shows how given our Moral Law that exists outside of ourselves must come from somewhere else, thus there must be a outside force or being. At this point, he does not even jump to there being a god, instead taking small logical steps in that direction.
One thing I found very interesting in this section was this quote from Chapter 1, when Lewis exlpains how we constantly fail to act in the way we expect others to act. Instead, we make excuses for ourselves as to why we should be the exception in this case. But he ends this section by saying: "For you notice that it is only for our bad behaviour that we find all these explanations. It is only our bad temper that we put down to being tired or worried or hungry; we put our good temper down to ourselves. I just thought this was a fascinating aspect of humans I have never thought about. Whenever we screw up, we can always pacify ourselves with one or more of these lame excuses, we can find find something outside ourselves to blame. But when we do do what we are supposed to, we are pleased to take ownership of that. Do we ever stop to consider that we act better towards others because someone first was kind to us? Do we ever remember we are in good spirits partially because someone took the effort to help us out? I think that once again Lewis has challenged us to think outside ourselves and focus on others instead, both in terms of the impacts we can have on them and the ways they can positively influence us.