Luther and Lewis

On the other hand, if your eye is a villain, you do not behave according to God’s commands, and your office, but you step out of line. All you think about is the gratification of your lust and love for money. Then your whole body is dark, and everything you do is damned before God and lost, even though the world may speak of you as a pious man.—Martin Luther, Sermon on the Mount, AE 21:180, 181

There are of course senses in which this true. God is no accepter of persons: His love for us is not measured by our social rank or our intellectual talents. But I believe there is a sense in which this maxim is the reverse of the truth. I am going to venture to say that artificial equality is necessary in the life of the state, but that in the Church we strip off this disguise, we recover our real inequalities, and are thereby refreshed and quickened.... I believe the authority of parent over child, husband over wife, learned over simple, to have been as much a part of the original plan as the authority of man over beast. I believe that if we had not fallen Filmer would be right, and patriarchal monarchy would be the sole lawful government.—C. S. Lewis, Business of Heaven, p. 213.