MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
Obviously you are making excellent progress. My only fear is lest in attempting
to hurry the patient you awaken him to a sense of his real position. For you and
I, who see that position as it really is, must never forget how totally
different it ought to appear to him. We know that we have introduced a change of
direction in his course which is already carrying him out of his orbit around he
Enemy; but he must be made to imagine that all the choices which have effected
this change of course are trivial and revocable. He must not be allowed to
suspect that he is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a
line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space.
For this reason I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer and a
communicant. I know there are dangers in this; but anything is better than that
he should realise the break it has made with the first months of his Christian
life. As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be
made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements
but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he
thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a
definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling
that he hasn't been doing very well lately.
This dim uneasiness needs careful handling. If it gets too strong it may wake
him up and spoil the whole game. On the other hand, if you suppress it
entirely—which, by the by, the Enemy will probably not allow you to do—we lose
an element in the situation which can be turned to good account. If such a
feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower
into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency. It increases the patient's
reluctance to think about the Enemy. All humans at nearly all times have some
such reluctance; but when thinking of Him involves facing and intensifying a
whole vague cloud of half-conscious guilt, this reluctance is increased tenfold.
They hate every idea that suggests Him, just as men in financial embarrassment
hate the very sight of a pass-book. In this state your patient will not omit,
but he will increasingly dislike, his religious duties. He will think about them
as little as he feels he decently can beforehand, and forget them as soon as
possible when they are over. A few weeks ago you had to tempt him to unreality
and inattention in his prayers: but now you will find him opening his arms to
you and almost begging you to distract his purpose and benumb his heart. He will
want his prayers to be unreal, for he will dread nothing so much as effective
contact with the Enemy. His aim will be to let sleeping worms lie.
As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradually freed
from the tiresome business of providing Pleasures as temptations. As the
uneasiness and his reluctance to face it cut him off more and more from all real
happiness, and as habit renders the pleasures of vanity and excitement and
flippancy at once less pleasant and harder to forgo (for that is what habit
fortunately does to a pleasure) you will find that anything or nothing is
sufficient to attract his wandering attention. You no longer need a good book,
which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a
column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste
his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in
conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You
can make him do nothing at all for long periods.
You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and
nothing given in return, so that at last he may say, as one of my own patients
said on his arrival down here, "I now see that I spent most of my life in doing
neither what I ought nor what I liked". The Christians describe the Enemy as one
"without whom Nothing is strong". And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to
steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of
the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of
curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of
fingers and kicking of heels, in whistling tunes that he does not like, or in
the long, dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give
them a relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature
is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young
tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do
remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the
man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that
their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the
Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the
safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without
sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter TWELVE
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