Life & Wisdom Quote by C. S. Lewis

Lewis is doing something sly here: rescuing “miracle” from the cheap thrill of cosmic rule-breaking and relocating it inside a sturdier universe. The line reads like a rebuttal delivered with a scholar’s calm, but the intent is pastoral as much as philosophical. If miracles are defined as violations, then the modern mind can dismiss them as either superstition or bad science. Lewis refuses that framing. He’s not conceding to materialism; he’s changing the terms so faith doesn’t have to pose as anti-intellectual theater.

The subtext is an argument about authorship. Nature’s “laws” are descriptions of regularities, not a prison God must pick. A miracle, for Lewis, is less a smashed clock than a clockmaker introducing a new factor into the system. The regular pattern still holds; it’s simply not the whole story. That move matters rhetorically because it steals the skeptic’s favorite weapon: “laws of nature” as a kind of secular scripture. Lewis treats laws as habits we’ve observed, not metaphysical handcuffs on reality.

Context sharpens the point. Writing in a mid-century Britain increasingly confident in scientific explanation, Lewis aims to make Christian claims sound neither primitive nor embarrassed. He’s also defending a version of wonder that isn’t childish. The miracle isn’t spectacle; it’s meaning entering the ordinary world without having to declare war on the ordinary. The sentence’s quiet certainty is the hook: it sounds like reason speaking, then nudges reason toward mystery.