“Niceness — wholesome, integrated personality — is an excellent thing. But we must not suppose that even if we succeeded in making everyone nice we should have saved their souls. A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world — and might even be more difficult to save."
"For mere improvement is not redemption, though redemption always improves people even here and now — and will, in the end, improve them to a degree we cannot yet imagine. God became man to turn creatures into sons: not simply to produce better men of the old kind but to produce a new kind of man. It is not like teaching a horse to jump better and better — but like turning a horse into a winged creature.” (C.S. Lewis)