If You Don't Have It, You Can't Give It

I just finished reading a wonderful little essay by C.S. Lewis called, "On the Transmission of Christianity." It is in God in the Dock. The subject is education, not conversion. Here are a couple of quotes that I enjoyed.

"A society which is predominantly Christian will propagate Christianity through its schools: one which is not, will not. All the ministries of education in the world cannot alter this law."

"As the teachers are, so they will teach."

"A majority of them [teachers] failed to hand on Christianity because they had it not: will you blame the eunuch because he gets no children or a stone because it yields no blood?"

"Where the tide flows towards increasing State control, Christianity, with its claims in one way personal and in the other way ecumenical and both ways antithetical to omnicompetent government, must always in fact (though not for a very long time in words) be treated as the enemy."

"If you make the adults of today Christian, the children of tomorrow will receive a Christian education. What a society has, that, be sure, and nothing else, it will hand on to its young."

"As long as Christians have children and non Christians do not, one need have no anxiety for the next century."