"From the moment a creature becomes aware of God as God and of itself as self, the terrible alternative of choosing God or self for the centre is opened to it.  This sin is committed daily by young children and ignorant peasants as well as by sophisticated persons, by solitaries no less than by those who live in society: it is the fall in every individual life, and in each day of each individual life, the basic sin behind all particular sins: at this very moment you and I are either committing it, or about to commit it, or repenting it.  We try, when we wake, to lay the new day at God's feet before we have finished shaving, it becomes our day and God's share in it is felt as a tribute which we must pay out of "our own" pocket, a deduction from the time which ought, we feel, to be "our own."...Thus all day long, and all the days of our life, we are sliding, slipping, falling away-as if God were, to our present consciousness, a smooth inclined plane on which there is no resting."

From The Problem of Pain

"The human spirit had turned from God and become its own idol, so that though it could still turn back to God, it could do so only by painful effort, and its inclination was self-ward.  Hence pride and ambition, the desire to be lovely in its own eyes and to depress and humiliate all rivals, envy, and restless search for more, and still more, security , were now the attitudes that came easiest to it...A new species, never made by God, had sinned itself into existence."

From The Problem of Pain