Welcome to the Hillsdale College Online Courses podcast.

I'm Jeremiah Regan.

And I'm Juan Davalo.

We are back with C.S. Lewis on Christianity, the last lecture of the course today, Heaven and Hell.

There's a striking scene in the last battle in which the dwarves, who are for the dwarves,

they fight for themselves, have been transported to Aslan's country, and they're surrounded by beauty,

and a rich feast is laid out before them, but they think they're still in the dark shed,

in the middle of a war, and they're surrounded by filthy hay, and they cannot see that they're

actually in the bright sunlight of paradise. Lewis paints these pictures so well, and he does that also

in The Great Divorce, which if you have not read that book, again, it's one of the greatest

books that I've read to understand this problem that a lot of non-believers

and I think believers also have of how can a good God send people to hell? Does he not love them?

And I think the way that Lewis answers that question in The Great Divorce is actually people choose

hell because when they are brought to heaven, when they are brought to the

possibility of heaven, they just don't want it. It's too costly. And people love their vices

and the things that keep them away from their full humanity and from being with God, from being

with a righteous God.

And so they choose not to enter heaven and they choose to go back to hell.

It's a beautiful book. I think it's, obviously, it's fiction, but I think it's a beautiful

picture on helping us understand that part of Christianity.

It takes us back to the very first lecture in this course, where

Lewis, through Dr. Ward, asserts that there is an objective standard for good. There's a moral

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