Category: Uncategorized

C. S. Lewis My dear Wormwood, I sometimes wonder whether you think you have been sent into the world for your own amusement. I gather, not from you miserably inadequate report but from that of the Infernal Police, that the patient’s behaviour during the first raid has been the worst possible. He has been very…

C. S. Lewis 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…

C. S. Lewis My dear Wormwood, Yes; courtship is the time for sowing those seeds which will grow up ten years later into domestic hatred. The enchantment of unsatisfied desire produces results which the humans can be made to mistake for the results of charity. Avail yourself of the ambiguity in the word ‘Love’: let…

C. S. Lewis My dear Wormwood, I have been in correspondence with Slumtrimpet who is in charge of your patient’s young woman, and begin to see the chink in her armour. It is an unobtrusive little vice which she shares with nearly all women who have grown up in an intelligent circle united by a…

C. S. Lewis My dear Wormwood, So! Your man is in love — and in the worst kind he could possibly have fallen into — and with a girl who does not even appear in the report you sent me. You may be interested to learn that the little misunderstanding with the Secret Police which…

C. S. Lewis My dear Wormwood, I note with great displeasure that the Enemy has, for the time being, put a forcible end to your direct attacks on the patient’s chastity. You ought to have known that He always does in the end, and you ought to have stopped before you reached that stage. For…

C. S. Lewis My dear Wormwood, Even under Slubglob you must have learned at college the routine technique of sexual temptation, and since, for us spirits, this whole subject is one of considerable tedium (though necessary as part of our training) I will pass it over. But on the larger issues involved I think you…

C. S. Lewis My dear Wormwood, You mentioned casually in your last letter that the patient has continued to attend one church, and one only, since he was converted, and that he is not wholly pleased with it. May I ask what you are about? Why have I no report on the causes of his…

C. S. Lewis My dear Wormwood, The most alarming thing in your last account of the patient is that he is making none of those confident resolutions which marked his original conversion. No more lavish promises of perpetual virtue, I gather; not even the expectation of an endowment of ‘grace’ for life, but only a…