Lewis

As personal and private life is lower than participation in the Body of Christ, so the collective life is lower than the person and private life and has no value save in its service…. As long as we are thinking only of natural values we must say that the sun looks down on nothing half so good as a houehold laughing together over a meal, or two friends talking over a pint of beer, or a man alone reading a book that interests him, and that all economics, politics, laws, armies, and institutions, save in so far as they prolong and multiply such scenes, are a mere ploughing the sand and sowing the ocean, a meaningless vanity and vexation of spirit.—Business of Heaven, p. 208.