MY DEAR WORMWOOD,
When I told you not to fill your letters with rubbish about the war, I meant, of
course, that I did not want to have your rather infantile rhapsodies about the
death of men and the destruction of cities. In so far as the war really concerns
the spiritual state of the patient, I naturally want full reports. And on this
aspect you seem singularly obtuse. Thus you tell me !with glee that there is
reason to expect heavy air raids on the town where the creature lives. This is a
crying example of something I have complained about already—your readiness to
forget the main point in your immediate enjoyment of human suffering. Do you not
know that bombs kill men? Or do you not realise that the patient's death, at
this moment, is precisely what we want to avoid?
He has escaped the worldly friends with whom you tried to entangle him; he has "fallen in love" with a very Christian woman and is temporarily immune from your attacks on his chastity; and the various methods of corrupting his spiritual life which we have been trying
are so far unsuccessful. At the present moment, as the full impact of the war
draws nearer and his worldly hopes take a proportionately lower place in his
mind, full of his defence work, full of the girl, forced to attend to his
neighbours more than he has ever done before and liking it more than he
expected, "taken out of himself" as the humans say, and daily increasing in
conscious dependence on the Enemy, he will almost certainly be lost to us if he
is killed tonight.
This is so obvious that I am ashamed to write it. I sometimes wonder if you young fiends are not kept out on temptation-duty too long at a time—if you are not in some danger of becoming infected by the sentiments and values of the humans among whom you work. They, of course, do tend to regard death as the prime evil and survival as the greatest good. But that is because we have taught them to do so. Do not let us be infected by our own propaganda. I
know it seems strange that your chief aim at the moment should be the very same
thing for which the patient's lover and his mother are praying—namely his bodily
safety. But so it is; you should be guarding him like the apple of your eye. If
he dies now, you lose him. If he survives the war, there is always hope.
The Enemy has guarded him from you through the first great wave of temptations. But,
if only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for your ally. The long, dull
monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity are
excellent campaigning weather. You see, it is so hard for these creatures to
persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and
youthful hopes, the quiet despair (hardly felt as pain) of ever overcoming the
chronic temptations with which we have again and again defeated them, the
drabness which we create in their lives and the inarticulate resentment with
which we teach them to respond to it—all this provides admirable opportunities
of wearing out a soul by attrition. If, on the other hand, the middle years
prove prosperous, our position is even stronger.
Prosperity knits a man to the World. He feels that he is "finding his place in it", while really it is finding its place in him. His increasing reputation, his widening circle of
acquaintances, his sense of importance, the growing pressure of absorbing and
agreeable work, build up in him a sense of being really at home in earth which
is just what we want. You will notice that the young are generally less
unwilling to die than the middle-aged and the old.
The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to life in
His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of
feeling at home anywhere else. That is why we must often wish long life to our
patients; seventy years is not a day too much for the difficult task of
unravelling their souls from Heaven and building up a firm attachment to the
earth. While they are young we find them always shooting off at a tangent. Even
if we contrive to keep them ignorant of explicit religion, the incalculable
winds of fantasy and music and poetry—the mere face of a girl, the song of a
bird, or the sight of a horizon—are always blowing our whole structure away.
They will not apply themselves steadily to worldly advancement, prudent
connections, and the policy of safety first.
So inveterate is their appetite for Heaven that our best method, at this stage, of attaching them to earth is to make them believe that earth can be turned into Heaven at some future date by politics or eugenics or "science" or psychology, or what not. Real worldliness
is a work of time—assisted, of course, by pride, for we teach them to describe
the creeping death as good sense or Maturity or Experience. Experience, in the
peculiar sense we teach them to give it, is, by the bye, a most useful word. A
great human philosopher nearly let our secret out when he said that where Virtue
is concerned "Experience is the mother of illusion"; but thanks to a change in
Fashion, and also, of course, to the Historical Point of View, we have largely
rendered his book innocuous.
How valuable time is to us may be gauged by the fact that the Enemy allows us so
little of it. The majority of the human race dies in infancy; of the survivors,
a good many die in youth. It is obvious that to Him human birth is important
chiefly as the qualification for human death, and death solely as the gate to
that other kind of life. We are allowed to work only on a selected minority of
the race, for what humans call a "normal life" is the exception. Apparently He
wants some—but only a very few—of the human animals with which He is peopling
Heaven to have had the experience of resisting us through an earthly life of
sixty or seventy years. Well, there is our opportunity. The smaller it is, the
better we must use it. Whatever you do, keep your patient as safe as you
possibly can,
Your affectionate uncle,
Letter TWENTYEIGHT
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