Time & Perspective Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis is doing something sly here: he flips the modern suspicion that “heaven-minded” people are useless on earth into an accusation that the real worldly deadweight is spiritual amnesia. The line is built like a trap. You come in expecting a defense of piety as private consolation, and he pivots to a pragmatic claim: the Christians who built hospitals, argued for abolition, founded schools, and organized relief did it not by downgrading eternity but by obsessing over it.

The intent is partly apologetic, partly disciplinary. Lewis isn’t praising vague religiosity; he’s scolding a church tempted to launder its faith into a soft civic ethic. The subtext is that “this world” activism, when severed from transcendent stakes, gets captured by whatever ideology happens to be loudest. You don’t become more relevant by trimming metaphysics; you become a volunteer arm of the age.

Context matters. Lewis is writing in mid-century Britain, with the rubble of war still visible and modernity offering shiny substitutes for salvation: nationalism, consumer comfort, technocratic planning. Against that backdrop, “think of the next” isn’t an invitation to escapism; it’s a demand for a different kind of realism. Eternity, for Lewis, disciplines desire, relativizes power, and frees believers to spend themselves without needing history to applaud.

Rhetorically, the sentence uses history as a witness, not a textbook: “you will find” sounds empirical, almost commonsense, while the final “ineffective in this” lands like a curt verdict. It’s a reminder that transcendence, paradoxically, can be a fuel for the most concrete work.