Here we look at the famous conclusion to Mere Christianity- in which Lewis addresses the impossibility of "finding ourselves" outside of Christ-and note the similarity to a passage from Sir Gibbie, one of the Ulsterman's favourite MacDonald novels.
“The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ’s and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it.... Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
“There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self — God’s idea of us when he devised us — the Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for himself; seeing of himself he does not even know what to search for. ‘But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.’ ”
