C.S. Lewis wrote about giving to the poor, but he also lived it out. All of the royalties for his books-- including the Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity-- he gave to the poor. And he also had a set amount from his salary as a professor from Oxford which he used for his living expenses and the rest he gave away. I don't know exactly how much he gave away, but it was substantial. We should consider this as we read these quotes:
“When Christianity tells you to feed the poor, it doesn’t give you lessons in cookery.”
“Some people nowadays say that charity ought to be unnecessary and that instead of giving to the poor we ought to be producing a society in which there were no poor to give to. They may be quite right in saying that we ought to produce this kind of society. But if anyone thinks that, as a consequence, you can stop giving in the meantime, then he has parted company with all Christian morality.
“I do not believe one can settle how much we ought to give. I am afraid the only safe rule is to give more than we can spare. In other words, if our expenditure on comforts, luxuries, amusements, etc, is up to the standard common among those with the same income as our own, we are probably giving away too little. If our charities do not at all pinch or hamper us, I should say they are too small. There ought to be things we should like to do and cannot do because our charities expenditure excludes them.”
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