"We have this treasure in clay jars to show that the power is from God and not from us"

Charles Williams was one of C. S. Lewis' closest friends after he became a Christian. Williams wrote a little book on forgiveness during the Second World War, and the encouraging insights in this passage on how we perceive our own progress in sanctification are well worth reading. Interestingly, Dietrich Bonhoeffer had been writing similar things just a few years earlier.

"The virtues, owing to the laborious detail in which they have to be pursued by us...are apt to be subdued to our own niggling style. But in themselves they are not so; they are gay and princely; and so they are seen when they are recognised in others simply because we are in a state of love towards others. We can admire them in their freedom in others when in ourselves they must seem, if not in servitude, at least only just escaped from servitude, sore from the manacles, bleeding from their effort at freedom, lame, purblind, unheavenly. it is our business to admire them heavenly whenever they can be so seen; the opportunity is in such states as marriage and friendship, and we do very well to take it whenever it is found. "This ought ye to have done, and not to have left the other undone." We must not ease from our own labour because the glory is seen free in another; but neither must we cease to admire the glory because the labour is all that we can feel in ourselves."

Charles Williams, "The Technique of Pardon," The Forgiveness of Sins (London: Bles, 1942)