In his weekly column today Marvin Olasky discusses the ever-diminishing practice of accepting personal responsibility (here’s Exhibit A), and recalls a warning sounded by C.S. Lewis in 1944 to university students:
“To nine out of 10 of
you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does
come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously
threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear.”Lewis noted that the invitation to do wrong would come in a
way hard to turn down — “Over a drink or a cup of coffee, disguised as
triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or
woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and
whom you hope to know better still — just at the moment when you are
most anxious not to appear crude, or naif or a prig — the hint will
come.”
Read the whole thing and capture Lewis’s prescience.
