Compound Interest in the Soul.
C.S. Lewis once observed that Christian charity can sound cold to people raised on sentiment. It is not the same as natural affection. Yet when a man sets himself to treat others kindly, even when he doesn't feel like it, he often discovers that affection follows. He ends up liking people he never imagined he could like. The same law, Lewis noted, works terribly in reverse. Cruelty breeds hatred, and hatred gives license to more cruelty. The Germans may have begun by mistreating the Jews because they hated them; afterward they hated them more because of what they had already done to them. Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the small everyday choices we make matter so much.
History keeps illustrating the point. In Nazi Germany, the machinery of hatred reached a point where no amount of Jewish virtue or restraint could stop the killing. The only thing that ended the slaughter was the destruction of the German war machine. Imperial Japan followed a parallel path: an ideology of hierarchy and destiny, compounded by atrocity after atrocity across Asia, until the conflict became a fight to the death. Again, it was military defeat, not moral example, that forced the end.
We see the rhyme in our own time. Certain strains of Islamic extremism display the same compounding dynamic. An ideology that divides the world into the pure and the impure treats outsiders as legitimate targets. Violence then hardens the ideology, making further violence feel righteous. No amount of charity has dissolved it. Where these groups have held power, the results have been grimly consistent. Their obvious tactical alliances with Marxist and far-left movements are sobering in their own way—not because of shared theology, but because of shared contempt for the existing order that can paper over deep contradictions in the short term. Today's useful idiots will eventually share the same fate as everyone else who allowed the "camel's nose under the tent."
Lewis was not a sentimentalist. He understood that organized evil sometimes rejects coexistence and must be met with force. Charity does not require us to pretend otherwise. Yet the deeper law he described still holds for the individual soul—every small act of cruelty or of costly kindness compounds. The strategic points we lose or gain in everyday life determine what kind of people we become, and what kind of society we help to shape. At the same time, we must remember that charity without discipline can become appeasement that seldom ends well for the charitable.
The problem we now face in this nation is how we reverse the importation of people who hate us and reform those already entrenched in our society. All immigration must be reduced to a trickle until those already here legally have assimilated. Those here illegally must go as quickly as they came. Until then, the headlines will keep rhyming with the past.
I will leave you with this: This is a time for unity. This is a time to put aside all our petty political differences and stand behind the one man who has the intestinal fortitude to put a stop to the Jihadist movement which seeks to tear down the existing world order and leave it in flames. An old proverb says, "In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king." We have that one-eyed man at the helm. We must stay the course.
(Ephesians 5:14-16) "Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you." Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.
