MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. Do not
indulge the hope that you will escape the usual penalties; indeed, in your
better moments, I trust you would hardly even wish to do so. In the meantime we
must make the best of the situation. There is no need to despair; hundreds of
these adult converts have been reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the Enemy's
camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily,
are still in our favour.
One of our great allies at present is the Church itself. Do not misunderstand
me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread out through all time and
space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess,
is a spectacle which makes our boldest tempters uneasy. But fortunately it is
quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the half-finished,
sham Gothic erection on the new building estate. When he goes inside, he sees
the local grocer with rather an oily expression on his face, bustling up to offer
him one shiny little book containing a liturgy which neither of them
understands, and one shabby little book containing corrupt texts of a number of
religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print. When he gets to his pew
and looks round him, he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he has
hitherto avoided.
You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro
between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next pew.
It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew really contains.
You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy's side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father
below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbours sing out of tune, or
have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite
easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow ridiculous. At his
present stage, you see, he has an idea of "Christians" in his mind which he
supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely pictorial. His mind is
full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the
other people in church wear modern clothes is a real — though of course an
unconscious — difficulty to him. Never let it come to the surface; never let him
ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now,
and you will have all eternity wherein to amuse yourself by producing in him the
peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.
Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anti-climax which is certainly coming
to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchman. The Enemy allows this
disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs
when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by Stories from the Odyssey
buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got married
and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of
life, it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The
Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these
disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His "free" lovers and
servants — "sons" is the word He uses, with His inveterate love of degrading the
whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the two-legged animals.
Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere
affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves
them to "do it on their own". And there lies our opportunity. But also,
remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness
successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much
harder to tempt.
I have been writing hitherto on the assumption that the people in the next pew
afford no rational ground for disappointment. Of course if they do — if the
patient knows that the woman with the absurd hat is a fanatical bridge-player or
the man with squeaky boots a miser and an extortioner — then your task is so much
the easier. All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question, "If
I, being what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian, why should
the different vices of those people in the next pew prove that their religion is
mere hypocrisy and convention?" You may ask whether it is possible to keep such
an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is!
Handle him properly and it simply won't come into his head. He has not been
anything like long enough with the Enemy to have any real humility yet. What he
says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom,
he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy's
ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great
humility and condescension in going to church with these "smug", commonplace
neighbours at all. Keep him in that state of mind as long as you can.
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter TWO
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