He Is No Patcher

“The law requires not only that we should do thus and thus but that we should do it with ‘a free, a willing, a lusty, and a louing hart’. Its beginning and end is that we should love God and our neighbours. It demands of us not only acts but new motives. This is what merely moral men — those who are now called ‘puritans’ though Tyndale, I am afraid, identified them with the Papists — never understand. The first step is to see the law as it really is, and despair. Real life does not begin till ‘the cockatrice of thy poysoned nature hath beheld herselfe in the glasse of the righteous law of God’ (Brief Declaration). For when God ‘buildeth he casteth all downe first. He is no patcher’ (Obedience).” (C.S. Lewis, English Literature in the 16th Century, p. 188).