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TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan 5/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Whether any individual Christian who attempts Faith Healing is prompted by genuine faith and charity or by spiritual pride is, I take it, a question we cannot decide. That is between God and him. Whether the cure occurs in any given case is clearly a question for the doctors. I am speaking now of healing by some act, such as anointing or laying on of hands. Praying for the sick—i.e. praying simply, without any overt act is unquestionably right and indeed we are commanded to pray for all men.¹ And of course your prayers can do real good.

Needless to say, they don’t do it either as a medicine does or as magic is supposed to do: i.e. automatically. Prayer is Request—like asking your employer for a holiday or asking a girl to marry one. God is free to grant the request or not: and if He does you cannot prove scientifically that the thing wd. not have happened anyway. Just as the boss might (for all you know) have given you a holiday even if you hadn’t asked. (Cynical people of my sex will tell one that if a girl has determined to marry you, married you wd. have been whether you asked her or not!). Thus one can’t establish the efficacy of prayer by statistics as you might establish the connection between pure milk and fewer cases of tuberculosis. It remains a matter of faith and of God’s personal action: it would become a matter of demonstration only if it were impersonal or mechanical.²

When I say ‘personal’ I do not mean private or individual. All our prayers are united with Christ’s perpetual prayer and are part of the Church’s prayer. (In praying for people one dislikes I find it v. helpful to remember that one is joining in His prayer for them.)

With all best wishes for the New Year.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): ³

Magdalen College

Oxford

Jan 5/51

Dear Mr. Van Auken

We must ask three questions about the probable effect of changing your research subject to something more theological.

(1.) Wd. it be better for your immediate enjoyment? Answer, probably but not certainly, Yes.

(2.) Wd. it be better for your academic career? Answer, probably No. You wd. have to make up in haste a lot of knowledge which cd. not be v. easily digested in the time.

(3.) Wd. it be better for your soul? I don’t know. I think there is a great deal to be said for having one’s deepest spiritual interest distinct from one’s ordinary duty as a student or professional man.

St Paul’s job was tent-making. When the two coincide I shd. have thought there was a danger lest the natural interest in one’s job and the pleasures of gratified ambition might be mistaken for spiritual progress and spiritual consolation: and I think clergymen sometimes fall into this trap.

Contrariwise, there is the danger that what is boring or repellent in the job may alienate one from the spiritual life. And finally someone has said ‘None are so unholy as those whose hands are cauterised with holy things’:⁴ sacred things may become profane by becoming matters of the job. You now want truth for her own sake: how will it be when the same truth is also needed for an effective footnote in your thesis? In fact, the change might do good or harm. I’ve always been glad myself that Theology is not the thing I earn my living by. On the whole, I’d advise you to get on with your tent-making. The performance of a duty will probably teach you quite as much about God as academic Theology wd. do. Mind, I’m not certain: but that is the view I incline to.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD): TS

REF.23/51.

Magdalen College,

6th January 1951

Dear Miss Pitter,

No, don’t! I mean don’t waste a copy on me. Contemporary pictures be blowed! It sounds horrible: the Ugly Duchess with a vengeance.

Incidentally, what is the point of keeping in touch with the contemporary scene? Why should one read authors one does’nt like because they happen to be alive at the same time as oneself? One might as well read everyone who had the same job or the same coloured hair, or the same income, or the same chest measurements, as far as I can see. I whistle, and plunge into the tunnel of term.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO PAULINE BAYNES (BOD):⁵ TS

RER20/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

8th January 1951.

Dear Miss Baynes,

My idea was that the map should be more like a medieval map than an Ordnance Survey–mountains and castles drawn—perhaps winds blowing at the corners—and a few heraldic-looking ships, whales and dolphins in the sea.⁶ Asian gazing at the moon would make an excellent cover design (to be repeated somewhere in the book; but do as you please about that.)

My brother once more joins me in all good wishes.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

You didn’t keep me a bit too long and I shd. have been v. glad if you’d stayed longer. I was hurried (I hope, not rudely so) only because I didn’t want to be left with a long vacancy between your departure and the next train).

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

8/1/51

Dear Mr. Van Auken

Look: the question is not whether we should bring God into our work or not. We certainly should and must: as MacDonald says ‘All that is not God is death.’⁷ The question is whether we should simply (a.) Bring Him in in the dedication of our work to Him, in the integrity, diligence, & humility with which we do it or also (b.) Make His professed and explicit service our job. The A vocation rests on all men whether they know it or not: the B vocation only on those who are specially called to it. Each vocation has its peculiar dangers & peculiar rewards. Naturally, I can’t say which is yours.

When I spoke of danger to your academic career on a change of subject I was thinking chiefly of time. If you can get an extra year, it wd. be another matter. I was not at all meaning that ‘intellectual history’ involving Theology wd. in itself he academically a bad field of research.

I shall at any time be glad to see, or hear from you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TOP. H. NEWBY(BBC): ⁸

C4/HT/PHN

Magdalen College

Oxford

11/1/51

Dear Mr. Newby

I don’t think I’d care to do a Work in Progress on my OHEL volume.⁹ I am hoping to drop rather a bomb by that book and don’t want to give too many warnings. Thanks for asking me.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER (BOD): ¹⁰

Magdalen College

Oxford

14/1/51

Dear Mr. (or Professor?) Kinter

The title of my children’s book (by the way, it is a single story not a collection) is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and the American edition is by Macmillan N. Y The only printed verse of mine outside the Regress (and a very early volume wh. I don’t want remembered)¹¹ is a poem called Dymer, recently reprinted with a new preface by Dents.¹² It first appeared in 1926 (I think—I’m weak on dates): also in Punch, over the signature N.W. (= Nat. Whilk = O.E. nát hwylc) several short pieces wh. are chiefly experiments in internal rhyme and consonance—not to be read unless you have strong metrical interests.

An amusing question whether my trilogy¹³ is an epic! Clearly, in virtue of its fantastic elements, it cd. only be an epic of the Ariosto type.¹⁴ But I shd. call it a Romance myself: it lacks sufficient roots in legend and tradition to be what I’d call an epic. Isn’t it more the method of Apuleius, Lucian and Rabelais, but diverted from a comic to a serious purpose?

No, I certainly didn’t know about the dissertation on Bernardus. And I’ve lost my own copy of the text!¹⁵

With many thanks & good wishes. Be sure and look me up if you’re ever rash enough to visit this conquered island.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.25/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th January 1951.

My dear Mr. Allen,

If when you first began to keep us afloat I had known that your kindness was going to continue over a number of years, I would have kept a record of your parcels; the number must now run into scores, and the weight into hundredweights! How do you do it? As I said once before, it is not so much your generosity as your hard work which impressed me; if the case was reversed, I hope I should try to behave to you and Mrs. Allen as you have done to me. But I should draw the line at coming home from my job and settling down to packing! (Anyway, I could’nt do it, being one of those whose fingers are all thumbs). Both the 11th and 12th December parcels have come in, and we are both very grateful for them.

They have I’m afraid been here a few days, but it is the beginning of the term, and my brother has only just got up after an attack of ‘flu, which has put us all behindhand. This is one of the worst influenza years we have had for a long time, and is in fact a battle on two fronts; one ‘wave’ of the disease coming over from Norway, and the other working north across France from the Mediterranean. Different types too, which is not making the doctor’s work any easier. In the north it is so bad that work at the port of Liverpool is held up, and they are burying people by night, as in the plague days. This does nothing to dissipate the gloom with which we, and no doubt you too, regard the prospects for 1951.

The brightest spot so far in the year has been the tonic of Eisenhower’s arrival:¹⁶ who is proving himself no mean diplomatist, and has won golden opinions wherever he has been. I see that even in Italy the hostile reception engineered for him by the Communists was a complete fiasco. He was made a freeman of the City of London at the end of the war, and there he made a big hit by talking of his ‘fellow Londoners’–and by recognizing and shaking hands with the chauffeur who had driven him during the war. Little things of course, but the little things count. I must say I don’t envy him his job though; not even Eisenhower can hold the Russians unless he is provided with an army, and the army still seems to be in the committee stage.

A small letter is a mighty poor return for two large parcels: but pupils are already knocking at the door, and I must get to work.

With many thanks and all the best wishes to you and your mother for 1951,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

Janie King Moore died at the Restholme Nursing Home, Oxford, on 12 January 1951. She was buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Headington Quarry, in the same grave as her friend Alice Hamilton Moore. ¹⁷

TO SARAH NEYIAN (W): TS

RER60/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th January 1951.

My dear Sarah

I am 100% with you about Rider Haggard. You know he wrote a sequel to She told by Holly, and called Ayesha; She and Alan, told by A. Quartermain: and Wisdom’s Daughter told by She herself.¹⁸ What comes out from reading all four is that She was (as Job assumed) a dreadful liar. A. Quartermain was the only man who wasn’t taken in by her. She is the best story of the four, though not the best written. A missionary told me that he had seen a little ruined Kxaal where the natives told him a white witch used to live who was called She-who-must-be-obeyed. Rider Haggard had no doubt heard this too, and that is the kernel of the story.

I also have just had ‘flu or I’d write more. Love to all.

Your affectionate Godfather,

C. S. Lewis

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen etc

31/1/51

My dear Arthur

Minto died a fortnight ago. Please pray for her soul.

Wd. it suit you if I arrived at your local inn on Sat. March 31st and left on Mon. April 16th? Can you let me know by return? And also if the inn cd. have me?¹⁹ If they’re fed up with my choppings & changings you can truly tell them that my circumstances are wholly changed. God bless you.

Yours

Jack

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD): ²⁰

Magdalen College

Oxford

31/1/51

My dear Roger

What two nights can you come to me? I prefer not a week end if you can possibly manage it. I suggest Feb 28 & 29th. (Feb 13, 20 & March 2nd no good). I miss you v. much. Love & duty to all of you.

Yours

Jack

TO MRS HALMBACHER(WHL):

Magdalen College,

January 1951

Dear Mrs Halmbacher

How very kind of you. This is absolutely the present I wanted, for the nuisance and waste of time of finding that one has’nt got an envelope at a critical moment is serious…

We are all chuckling over a certain West of England resort which is I’m told circulating the American tourist agencies to this effect–‘When you come to England come straight to—. We guarantee that we are taking absolutely no part in the Festival of Britain.’²¹

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

7/2/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

First, I must apologise for not having acknowledged Woodbridge on Nature.²² It arrived safely: many thanks. I have not read it yet but it is on the waiting list. (You will understand that I am never in the position of looking for a book to read, but nearly always looking for time in which to read books!)

If ‘planning’ is taken in the literal sense of thinking before one acts and acting on what one has thought out to the best of one’s ability, then of course planning is simply the traditional virtue of Prudence and not only compatible with, but demanded by, Christian ethics. But if the word is used (as I think you use it) to mean some particular politico-social programme, such as that of the present British Govt, then one cd. only say after examining that programme in detail. I don’t think I have studied it enough to do that. As for the ‘planning’ involved in your social work I am of course even less qualified.

It is certainly not wrong to try to remove the natural consequences of sin provided the means by which you remove them are not in themselves another sin. (E.g. it is merciful and Christian to remove the natural consequences of fornication by giving the girl a bed in a maternity ward and providing for the child’s keep and education, but wrong to remove them by abortion or infanticide). Perhaps the enclosed article (I don’t want it back) will make the point clearer.

Where benevolent planning, armed with political or economic power, can become wicked is when it tramples on people’s rights for the sake of their good.

Your letter gave me great pleasure: you are apparently on the right road. With all blessings.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

On 8 February 1951 there was a vote for the Professor of Poetry by the MAs of Oxford University. C. S. Lewis was running against Cecil Day-Lewis.²³ Warnie Lewis wrote in his diary that evening: ‘While we were waiting to dine at the Royal Oxford…came the bad news that [Jack] had been defeated by C. Day Lewis for the Poetry Chair, by 194 votes to 173.J took it astonishingly well, much better than his backers.’²⁴

TO SEYMOUR SPENCER (P): ²⁵

Magdalen etc.

28/2/51

Dear Doctor Spencer

Thanks v. much for the bit from Fromm.²⁶

I enclose an offprint (I don’t want it back) from the Australian Twentieth Century wh. I hope makes my point clear.²⁷ Quote directly or indirectly from this at pleasure. I look forward to seeing yr. paper in the Month and wd. be happy to read the typescript if you think I can be of any help.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY (L): ²⁸

[Magdalen College]

5 March 1951

How right you are: the great thing is to stop thinking about happiness. Indeed the best thing about happiness itself is that it liberates you from thinking about happiness—as the greatest pleasure that money can give us is to make it unnecessary to think about money. And one sees why we have to be taught the ‘not thinking’ when we lack as well as when we have. And I’m sure that, as you say, you will ‘get through somehow in the end’.

Here is one of the fruits of unhappiness: that it forces us to think of life as something to go through. And out at the other end. If only we could steadfastly do that while we are happy, I suppose we shd. need no misfortunes. It is hard on God really. To how few of us He dare send happiness because He knows we will forget Him if He gave us any sort of nice things for the moment…

I do get that sudden feeling that the whole thing is hocus pocus and it now worries me hardly at all. Surely the mechanism is quite simple? Sceptical, incredulous, materialistic ruts have been deeply engraved in our thought, perhaps even in our physical brains by all our earlier lives. At the slightest jerk our thought will flow down those old ruts. And notice when the jerks come. Usually at the precise moment when we might receive Grace. And if you were a devil would you not give the jerk just at those moments? I think that all Christians have found that he is v. active near the altar or on the eve of conversion: worldly anxieties, physical discomforts, lascivious fancies, doubt, are often poured in at such junctures…But the Grace is not frustrated. One gets more by pressing steadily on through these interruptions than on occasions when all goes smoothly…

I am glad you all liked ‘The Lion’. A number of mothers, and still more, schoolmistresses, have decided that it is likely to frighten children, so it is not selling very well. But the real children like it, and I am astonished how some very young ones seem to understand it. I think it frightens some adults, but very few children…

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

6/3/51

My dear Roger

(Of course, yes: I thought I had asked you to do so). You are quite right about a wood fire.²⁹ Wood keeps on glowing red again in the places you have already extinguished—phoenix-like. Even the large webbed feet of a marsh-wiggle couldn’t do it. Yet it must be a flat hearth, I think. Does peat go out easily by treading? As an Irishman I ought to know, but don’t. I think it will have to [be] a coal fire on a flat hearth. After all, Underland might well use coal, whereas wood or charcoal wd. have to be imported.

I finished the Antigeos book.³⁰ There are two and only two, good ideas in it: the (supposed) ‘fog’ on the voyage and the great tidal waves on the Antigosian sea. All else is as dull as ditchwater: a flat, featureless, landscape and deadly municipal restaurants. The inhabitants are less interesting than any other-worlders I have yet met.

I enjoyed our biduum³¹ or pair-o’-days v. much. Love to both.

Yours

Jack

TO RUTH PITTER (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

17/3/51

Dear Miss Pitter

I hope you haven’t thought I was being such a brute beast as to obey your ‘Don’t write’. I was more innocently employed in having my third dose of influenza this year–or rather, now that I look at the date of your letter, it must have been my second and third, for the flash of daylight between the two tunnels was almost too short to notice.

The book is most beautiful,³² yet not with any fussy and intrusive beauty that reduces the poems to parts of a pattern. My old friends look better in their new site—for I’m no Manichean, and think the beautiful soul should have a beautiful body. But one reason why they look better is that they are better than I remembered. I find that my very favourite, The Sparrow’s Skull, had in memory preserved only its poignancy and lost a great deal of its delicacy and poetic breeding. More shame to me when it was on my shelves and memory—apparently a vulgarising memory—could have been corrected. I say, Sinking, which I hadn’t properly noticed before, is a corker. So indeed are dozens. It is a good time for re-reading: I have the precious vulnerability of the convalescent. Why do they call it ‘depression’? I like it.

The engraving is perfect except for (possibly) the Muses’ profile where I think the heavy, moustache-like shadow on the upper lip is a pity:³³ but probably not so in the original. Yes. I have good reason to remember your vine and ‘to consider it’ (as in this picture) ‘is to taste it spiritually’–so Traherne says in his Centuries of Meditations,³⁴ which I expect you know and am sure, if you know, you love.

When next term cd. you come down and lunch? There’s an extra reason: you have property to reclaim. Groping in the inn’ards of an old arm chair lately (a place which rivals the sea bed for lost treasure) I fished out a spectacle case which, being opened, revealed your golden name wrapped in your silver address. So come in May or June: preferably not a Tuesday. Let me know your ideas on this.

I’m off to Northern Ireland after Easter to try my native air—half frightened at the thought. Very many thanks for the book: it has given me great pleasure already.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

17/3/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

No. Unless it attracts you as an amusement I wouldn’t advise you to start attending ‘classes’. My idea is that unless one has to qualify oneself for a job (which you haven’t) the only sensible reason for studying anything is that one has a strong curiosity about it. And if one has, one can’t help studying it. I don’t see any point in attending lectures etc with some general notion of ‘self-improvement’–unless, as I say, one finds it fun.

I never see why we should do anything unless it is either a duty or a pleasure! Life’s short enough without filling up hours unnecessarily. And I think one usually learns more from a book than from a lecture.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO CHRISTIAN HARDIE (P): ³⁵

Magdalen etc

22/3/51

Dear Christian

Your commands have been obeyed.³⁶ About half way through, not having yet met a single scene or character that thoroughly engaged my interest, I nearly gave up: but perseverance was rewarded, for the second half is better. One forgives Julia quite a lot for her outburst on p 255 about Charles’s ‘damned bounderish way’.

Waugh is a writer, certainly. Many descriptions, phrases, and long-tailed similes pleased me: but not the novel, as a novel. If one’s going to tell the story through one of the characters then, surely, either that character ought to be a fairly sane and straightforward one (as in Erewhon³⁷ or Rob Roy),³⁸ or else, if he’s a monstrosity, then the other characters ought to be normal (as in Hogg’s Justified Sinner³⁹ or McKenna’s Well Meaning Woman).⁴⁰

As Chesterton said, you can have a story about a knight among dragons, but not about a dragon among dragons.⁴¹ Or, to come nearer, I can manage humans seen in a distorting mirror or goblins seen in an ordinary mirror: but goblins in a distorting mirror is too much. In spite of clear distinctions, the narrator is so very much ‘the same kind of thing’ as Blanche & Sebastian and his own father & Ld. M, and all the others—the tiresome seen through the eyes of the tiresome. And Sebastian would be a terrible bore on any terms. The narrator’s spontaneous dislike [of] all nice people (e.g. old Lady M. or Ld. Brideshead) has, I suppose, a theological significance?

But apart from all this—what, please, ought I now to know about the ‘contemporary scene’ after reading it? His picture of undergraduate life is, I suspect, much more characteristic of 1912 than of 1923: but for obvious reasons cd. not be really characteristic of any period. Not even characteristic within the circles he describes: for though I didn’t know them, I do know that if I did they wouldn’t look at all like that to me–any more than the circles I do know consist solely of Hoopers.⁴² Julia’s excellent remark about Mottram on p. 277 (‘He was a tiny bit of one’) seems to me true of all the characters except Julia herself. There isn’t one that is round and live like Levin⁴³ or the Rostovs,⁴⁴ or Archdeacon Grantly,⁴⁵ or Ld. Monmouth in Coningsby.⁴⁶ They’re more like people out of an Oscar Wilde melodrama, only without the epigrams.

Am I missing the point? Haunted by that fear I asked a man so young that W is to him an old master what he had got out of the book. He said ‘Oh, snob-value: it delighted the housemaid in me’ (i.e. he got out of it the same sort of pleasure my generation got out of Benson—I mean the Dodo one).⁴⁷ But that can’t be why you admire it. Nor can you think that ‘the contemporary scene’ is just what W describes: because after all we have independent access (worse luck!) to that scene. I’m puzzled.

You shall prescribe me a book to read every Lent: a kind of literary hair shirt.

You gave me a charming interlude on Tuesday—a bit of ‘contemporary scene’ quite omitted by W.!

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

[The Kilns]

23/3/51

My dear Arthur

Naturally, without a Co. Down Ry.⁴⁸ time-table I can’t tell you what time I’d be at Helen’s Bay! But we shall find better uses for your petrol, and I’ll come by bus from Oxford St. I’m glad to know there’s a ‘regular’ service and am wondering whether it runs regularly every 5 minutes, every hour, once a week, or only a century.⁴⁹ No doubt I shall find out.

Looking forward!–yes, I can’t keep the feeling within bounds. I know now how a bottle of champagne feels while the wire is being taken off the cork.

Yours

Jack

Pop!!

TO DOUGLAS EDISON HARDING (P): ⁵⁰

Magdalen etc

Easter Day [25 March] 1951

Dear Mr. Harding

Hang it all, you’ve made me drunk, roaring drunk as I haven’t been on a book (I mean, a book of doctrine: imaginative works are another matter) since I first read Bergson during World War I.⁵¹ Who or what are you? How have you lived 40 years without my hearing of you before? Understand at once that my delight is not, alas!, so significant as it may seem, for I was never a scientist and have long ceased to be even the very minor philosopher I once was.

A great deal of your book is completely beyond me. My opinion is of no value. But my sensation is that you have written a work of the highest genius. It may not be—I mean, I can’t vouch that it is–philosophical genius. It may be only literary genius. The feeling I get is like a mix up of Pindar, Dante, & Patmore. (But can anything be so well written if it’s not good thought as well?). You follow the rocket course wh. you ascribe to Tellus.⁵² Paragraph after paragraph starts as if we were embarked for only the sort of Pantheistic uplift one gets in Emerson, but then swoops down and comes all clean & hard. But remember always, I don’t really understand: especially the crucial cap. 13 wh. is no easier than the Deduction of the Categories. (One difficulty is that my excitement makes me read it too quickly).

One criticism. Somebody is sure to answer the Missing Head gambit by saying that it wd. have no meaning for a blind man who knew the world and himself by palpation instead of vision.⁵³ My head is just as feelable (tho’ not as visible) as the rest of me. In other words, they’ll say, you have merely tripped over the fact that the eyes are in the Head. I’m sure this objection misses the real point: but had it not better be obviated, if only in a footnote?

England is disgraced if this book doesn’t get published: yet ordinary publishers will be so likely to send it to someone like Ryle to vet, and that will be fatal. Gollancz, Sheed, Faber, are possibles.

May I pass on my copy to Owen Barfield?–I must have someone to talk to about it.

When can we meet? Can you come over sometime next May or June and dine? (I can provide bed & breakfast)

I now feel that my illnesses etc are no excuse for my not having read it before. That this celestial bomb shd. have lain undetonated on my table all these months is a kind of allegory. Thanks to the Nth.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

P.S. On p. 97 (30b) Further, it was until recently often held…By whom? I thought the doctrine always was that of my eldila⁵⁴–‘He has no need at all for anything that is made⁵⁵…He has infinite use for all that is made.’

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th March 1951.

Dear Miss Pitter,

May I book May 10th: 1.15? The ferly in the engraving is not at all like a concrete mixer.⁵⁶

I did’nt know arm chairs were ever cleaned: should they be?⁵⁷

Yours ignorantly,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER(W): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

26th March 1951.

My dear George,

The time has come, the Walrus said, to talk of many things⁵⁸–but chiefly of when you next propose to take a bed in College. Any time you like after the 23rd of next month, Mondays excepted, and also excepting 8th and 15th May.

Pray, Sir, how does Moira do? And Cardinal Schwanda?⁵⁹ All well here except myself, who have a bad cold; but I’m off to Ireland I hope on Friday for a fortnight, which may shift it. (Warnie in his usual way of encouragement, reads me paragraphs from the paper at breakfast about liners wind bound in the Mersey and waves 61/2 feet high off the Irish coast.)

Yours

Jack

TO CHRISTIAN HARDIE (P):

[Magdalen]

27/3/51

Dear Christian

The difference isn’t exactly that I read a novel for the characters. It’s more that for me a novel, or any work of art, is primarily a Thing, an Object, enjoyed for its colour, proportions, atmosphere, its flavour—the Odyssey-ishness of the Odyssey⁶⁰ or the Learishness of K Lear: but never, never (here is the real difference) as a personal acquaintance with the author.

Of course it is not a question of where I like the characters in the sense of wishing to meet them in real life. In that sense I like Sebastian better than lulia (or dislike him less): but I ‘like’ lulia better as a character in the sense that I find her live & worth reading about, while I find him dull. What matters more than absolute liking or disliking is some degree of sympathy with the author’s revealed preferences. I didn’t think the mother & Brideshead ‘priggish & imperious’ & I didn’t think Ryder ‘a sane & ordinary chap!’ As to liking & disliking the ‘idea’ of twitch-on-the-thread, I’m not absolutely certain that I often have any experience I wd. call liking or disliking an idea.

My trouble is quite different: a twitch-on-the-thread conversion doesn’t seem to me to be capable of artistic presentation. When the old man crosses himself we are shown (and can only be shown) only the physical gesture. The difference between (a.) Grace (b.) Momentary sentiment (c.) Semi-conscious revival of a gesture learned in childhood, can’t appear. It can be in real life. But in art de non existentibus et non apparentibus eadem lex.⁶¹ In fact, we’re left to put in all the important part for ourselves. I know about the veil over Agamemnon’s face:⁶² but the success must have depended on the rest of the picture

As to whether ‘religious people should be good’ Nicholas⁶³ seemed to have sounder views than Waugh!

I await your next prescription with interest. We might even make it Advent instead of Lent!

I liked yr. friend extremely.

Yours

Jack

TO VERA MATHEWS (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

27/3/51

Dear Miss Mathews

I have just got your letter of the 22nd. containing the sad news of your father’s death. But, dear lady, I hope you and your mother are not really ‘trying to pretend it didn’t happen’. It does happen, happens to all of us, and I have no patience with the high minded people who make out that it ‘doesn’t matter’. It matters a great deal, and very solemnly. And for those who are left, the pain is not the whole thing. I feel v. strongly (and I am not alone in this) that some good comes from the dead to the living in the months or weeks after the death. I think I was much helped by my own father after his death: as if our Lord welcomed the newly dead with the gift of some power to bless those they have left behind; His birthday present. Certainly, they often seem just at that time, to be very near us. God bless you all and give you grace to receive all the good in this, as in every other event, is intended you.

My brother joins me in great thanks for all your kindnesses, and especially on behalf of dear little comical Victor Drewe—our barber, as you know.⁶⁴ When he cut my hair last week he spoke in the most charming way of his wife who has just been ill and (he said) ‘She looks so pretty, Sir, so pretty, but terribly frail.’ It made one want to laugh & cry at the same time—the lover’s speech, and the queer little pot-bellied, grey-headed, unfathomably respectable figure. You don’t misunderstand my wanting to laugh, do you? We shall, I hope, all enjoy one another’s funniness openly in a better world.

I have had flu’ three times but am better now and am going for a holiday on Friday. As to beef—it’s an ill wind that blows nobody any good: I expect the bulls enjoy roaming the Argentine plains & really like that better than being eaten in England!

Yrs. Sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

27/3/51

My dear Firor

Your letter came to cheer a rather grim day. I have never known a spring like this: the sun has hardly appeared since last October and this morning a thin mixture of rain & snow is falling. My own household is lucky because we have a wood, and therefore wood (what a valuable idiom) for fires: there is hardly any coal in England. The worst of a wood fire—delightful to eye and nose—is that it demands continual attention. But this is a trifle: many people have to spend most of their leisure at the cinema because it is the only warm place. (I hardly ever go myself. Do you? It seems to me an astonishingly ugly art. I don’t mean ‘ugly’ in any high flying moral or spiritual sense, but just disagreeable to the eye–crowded, unrestful, inharmonious)

There has been a great change in my life owing to the death of the old lady I called my mother. She died without apparent pain after many months of semi conscious existence, and it wd. be hypocritical to pretend that it was a grief to us.

Of your three rules I heartily agree with the first and the third. The second (‘keep rested’) sounds at first as if our obedience to it must v. often depend on many factors outside our control. I can think of some in whose ears it would sound like a cruel mockery. But I suspect that you have a reply. Do you mean that there is a kind of rest which ‘no man taketh from us’⁶⁵ and which can be preserved even in the life of a soldier on active service or of a woman who works behind a counter all day and then goes home to work and mend and wash? And no doubt there is: but it doesn’t always include rest for the legs.

‘His plan for the day’–yes, that is all important. And I keep losing sight of it: in days of leisure and happiness perhaps even more than in what we call ‘bad’ days.

The whole difficulty with me is to keep control of the mind and I wish one’s earliest education had given one more training in that. There seems to be a disproportion between the vastness of the soul in one respect (i.e. as a mass of ideas and emotions) and its smallness in another (i.e. as central, controlling ego). The whole inner weather changes so completely in less than a minute. Do you read George Herbert—

If what soul doth feel sometimes My soul might always feel—⁶⁶

He’s a good poet and one who helped to bring me back to the Faith.

My brother and all other ham-eating beneficiaries (shd. I call us Hamsters?) join me in good wishes. All blessings.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS HALMBACHER(L):

[Magdalen College

March 1951]

The question for me (naturally) is not ‘Why should I not be a Roman Catholic?’ but ‘Why should I?’ But I don’t like discussing such matters, because it emphasises differences and endangers charity. By the time I had really explained my objection to certain doctrines which differentiate you from us (and also in my opinion from the Apostolic and even the Medieval Church), you would like me less.

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD):

17/4/51

Dear Van Auken

My prayers are answered. No: a glimpse is not a vision. But to a man on a mountain road by night, a glimpse of the next three feet of road may matter more than a vision of the horizon. And there must perhaps always be just enough lack of demonstrative certainty to make free choice possible: for what could we do but accept if the faith were like the multiplication table?

There will be a counter attack on you, you know, so don’t be too alarmed when it comes. The enemy will not see you vanish into God’s company without an effort to reclaim you. Be busy learning to pray and (if you have made up yr. mind on the denominational question) get confirmed.

Blessings on you and a hundred thousand welcomes. Make use of me in any way you please: and let us pray for each other always.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO R. W. CHAPMAN (BOD): ⁶⁷

Magdalen

17/4/51

Dear Chapman

Did I ever denigrate Horace? If so, I deserve to be struck blind like Stesichorus (was it?) for insulting Helen.⁶⁸ But I dare say I did: I wouldn’t now. The truth is I am just returning to him after a period of idolatrous admiration for him in boyhood and a long intervening alienation. The risus ab angulo stanza⁶⁹ alone is proof enough.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

18/4/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Thanks for your letter of the 7th. I have just returned from a holiday and the time since has been spent in writing about 40 letters with my own hand: so much for Ivory Towers.

I also find your question v. difficult in my own life. What is right we usually know, or it is our own fault if we don’t: but what is prudent or sensible we often do not. Is it part of the scheme that we shd. ordinarily be left to make the best we can of our own v. limited and merely probable reasonings? I don’t know. Or wd. guidance even on these points be more largely given if we had early enough acquired the regular habit of seeking it?

How terrible your anxiety about your daughter must have been. She shall have her place in my prayers, such as they are.

Walsh didn’t know much about my private life.⁷⁰ Strictly between ourselves, I have lived most of it (that is now over) in a house wh. was hardly ever at peace for 24 hours, amidst senseless wranglings, lyings, backbitings, follies, and scares. I never went home without a feeling of terror as to what appalling situation might have developed in my absence. Only now that it is over (tho’ a different trouble has taken its place)⁷¹ do I begin to realise quite how bad it was.

God bless you all.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER MADELEVA CSC (W): ⁷²

Magdalen College,

Oxford

18/4/51

Dear Sister Madeleva

I don’t know whether I shd. thank you or your publishers for so kindly sending me a copy of your wholly delightful Lost Language.⁷³ At any rate I have to thank you for writing it. There has been nothing v. like it before and it emphasises a side of Chaucer too often neglected. I am glad you say a word on behalf of ‘conventions’ on p. 17. I always tell my pupils that a ‘convention’ appears to be such only when it has ended.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MISS BRECKENRIDGE (I):

Magdalen etc

19 April 1951

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

Many religious people, I’m told, have physical symptoms like the ‘prickles’ in the shoulder. But the best mystics set no value on that sort of thing, and do not set much on visions either. What they seek and get is, I believe, a kind of direct experience of God, immediate as a taste or colour. There is no reasoning in it, but many would say that it is an experience of the intellect—the reason resting in its enjoyment of its object…

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

[The Kilns]

22/4/51

My dear Arthur

You were quite right to leave me when you did. A farewell meal is a doleful business: it was much better for me to get my luggage dumped and my berth found & for you to be back at home as soon as possible.

Thank Elizabeth for her letter.⁷⁴ She will understand, I am sure, why I don’t want to continue the discussion by post: my correspondence involves a great number of theological letters already which can’t be neglected because they are answers to people in great need of help & often in great misery.

I have hardly ever had so much happiness as during our late holiday. God bless you–and the Unbelievable.⁷⁵ Pas de jambon encore.⁷⁶

Yours

Jack

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

22/4/51

My dear Roger—

May 31st & June 1st will do me nicely. May I book you a room for those two nights?

I doubt if you’ll find me both in and without a pupil on April 26th except between lunch & tea, when I suppose June will be in the Sheldonian. Cd. you ring me up if convenient?

Love to all three.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

[The Kins]

23/4/51

My dear Arthur

 (1.) A Ham has been posted to you today.

 (2.) My plans, if they fit with Yours, for the summer are as follows.

 (a.) Short visit to C’fordsburn with W. Aug. 10 (arrive llth)-Aug. 14

 (b.) Stay with W. in S’thern Ireland Aug. 14-28.

 (c.) Longer visit to C’fordsburn alone Aug. 28-Sept. 11th. Can you be in residence at Silver Hill Aug. 28th-Sept. 11th?

Blessings,

Jack

TO DOM BEDE GRIFFITHS OSB (W):

Magdalen etc.

23/4/51

Dear Dom Bede—

A succession of illnesses and a holiday in Ireland have so far kept me from tackling Lubac.⁷⁷ The Prelude⁷⁸ has accompanied me through all the stages of my pilgrimage: it and the Aeneid (which I never feel you value sufficiently) are the two long poems to wh. I most often return.

The tension you speak of (if it is a tension) between doing full & generous justice to the Natural while also paying unconditional & humble obedience to the Supernatural is to me an absolute key position. I have no use for mere either-or people (except, of course, in that last resort, when the choice, the plucking out the right eye, is upon us: as it is in some mode, every day.⁷⁹ But even then a man needn’t abuse & blackguard his right eye. It was a good creature: it is my fault, not its, that I have got myself into a state wh. necessitates jettisoning it).

The reason I doubt whether it is, in principle, even a tension is that, as it seems to me, the subordination of Nature is demanded if only in the interests of Nature herself. All the beauty of nature withers when we try to make it absolute. Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things.⁸⁰ We never get, say, even the sensual pleasure of food at its best when we are being greedy.

As to Man being in ‘evolution’, I agree, tho’ I wd. rather say ‘in process of being created’.

I am no nearer to your Church than I was but don’t feel v. inclined to re-open a discussion. I think it only widens & sharpens differences. Also, I’ve had enough of it on the opposite flank lately, having fallen among—a new type to me—bigoted & proselytising Quakers! I really think that in our days it is the ‘undogmatic’ & ‘liberal’ people who call themselves Christians that are most arrogant & intolerant. I expect justice & even courtesy from many Atheists and, much more, from your people: from Modernists, I have come to take bitterness and rancour as a matter of course.

I might get down to see you some time this year. No chance of your visiting Oxford?

Yours always

C. S. Lewis

TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen etc.

23/4/51

Dear Firor

I guessed what response my news would elicit from your friendly heart and awaited it with mixed pleasure and pain: pleasure because your amazing good will (I am still puzzled as to how I acquired it) is always as cheering as a bright fire on a winter day, pain because I cannot respond as you wd. wish. I have seized my new freedom to get that infernal book on the XVIth Century done, or as nearly done as I can. The College is giving me a year off to do it, but the work can be done only in England, and much less ambitious holidays than a jaunt to America will serve my turn.

I am not naturally mobile. But you are. Is there no chance of seeing you in England? (Not, of course, in connection with this idiotic ‘Festival’⁸¹ of which I and some others are heartily ashamed—such untimely nonsense!)

And now to business…I feel twice the man I have been for the last ten years. God bless you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO COLIN HARDIE (P): ⁸²

24/4/51

Dear Colin—

This is even more exciting than Oedipus.⁸³ The excessive length comes from the intrusion of matter relevant & interesting for the history of Greek religion but not, or not so much, for the Christian interpretation of reviving Gk. Myths. Unfortunately you are so concatenated & sagacious that v. few of the bits I want removed come away quite clean. Amputation, especially in another man’s work, is v. dangerous, so the following lists of delenda must be treated as tentative, and if you accept all or any of them you must then go carefully through what is left to remove ‘fossils’. They are

Dele⁸⁴ on p3 from It is the presupposition to Trojans raw from At this point (5a) to types of character (5e) from who formed a guild (9) to and unity (10) from Groups of three (11) to or under earth (12) from Professor Rose, thinking (12) to human history (15) from We have seen (16) to of sacrifice (17) from To the Aegean peoples to where they could (19) Then go to ‘The Greeks, unlike the Aegean peoples, allowed the idea’ etc. from The Greek idea (2) to always disbelieved (21) from In popular theology (24) to from matter (25)

Most, if not all, of these I shall be sorry to lose. But, as Ridley sagely remarks, the business of a cutter is to cut.⁸⁵ You cd. expect from me only one of three things: a refusal to cut, a recommendation to cut passages because they were bad, or a recommendation to cut passages although they were good. You’ve got the third wh. is presumably what you’d prefer.

I do long to see all this out in book form where you have elbow room, for I really think it is some of the most important work that is being done in our time. I think I told you before of the advice wh. old Macan⁸⁶ gave me long ago ‘Don’t put off writing until you know everything or you’ll be too old to write decently’

It must be fun being you.

Yours

Jack

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

30/4/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen—

No, the ‘different trouble’ is not an illness, or not an illness of mine. I could hardly tell you of it without a breach of confidence.

My holiday was only in a hotel, but in my old country & near the house of an old friend.

My prayer for Genia (an interesting name, by the way) cd. not naturally take the form you suggest. A little too schematic for my habits: and, to tell you the truth, a little bit like giving God a lecture on Theology!

As to MacArthur, I don’t feel in a position to have clear opinions about anyone I know only from newspapers. You see, whenever they deal with anyone (or anything) I know myself, I find they’re always a mass of lies & misunderstandings: so I conclude they’re no better in the places where I don’t know.

Nations being ‘friends’ is only a metaphor: they’re not people, and their co-operation depends, alas, on professional politicians & journalists whom you & I can’t control.

In fact, as you see, I’m a terrible sceptic about all public affairs. I am inclined to think that your Mac A and our Montgomery are specimens of a new, dangerous, & useful type thrown up by the modern situation–but it’s only a guess.

In haste. God bless you all.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO THE EDITOR OF ESSAYS IN CRITICISM ⁸⁷

Magdalen College,

Oxford,

May 3rd, 1951.

Dear Sir,

I have read Mr. Watt’s essay on Robinson Crusoe⁸⁸ with great interest and almost complete agreement. But what does he mean when he says that the myths of Midas and the Rheingold are ‘inspired by the prospect of never having to work again’ (p. 104)? Surely the point of the first story is that Midas’s golden touch brought starvation: and the point of the second that the gold carried a curse. If the gold in either story has an economic signification at all (which might be questioned) the meaning must be less banal than Mr. Watt suggests.⁸⁹

Yours truly,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER(W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

5/5/51

I had no notion of all this oriental background to you–barbaric pearl & gold.

Glad to hear the illness was not serious. Any chance of a night or week-end later? I needn’t say how welcome you’d be.

J.

Love to both from both.

TO AN ANONYMOUS GENTLEMAN (P): TS

REF.236/51

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

12th May 1951.

Dear Sir,

If I knew a little more about the subject I should have been very glad to introduce your edition of the Psalms. But whatever I tried to say, I should come up against my ignorance. The right person to do it would be Sister Penelope, C.S.M.V., St Mary’s Convent, Wantage, who understands both their religious use, and something of their history.

With all good wishes,

yours faithfully,

C. S. Lewis

TO VALERIE PITT (BOD): ⁹⁰

Magdalen College

Oxford

15/5/51

Dear Miss Pitt—

It seemed to me after I’d got to bed that in my anxiety to prod a silent meeting into some semblance of debate I may have given the impression that I overlooked what Farrer⁹¹ rightly called the richness of yr. paper. The parts of it we wd. really like to have discussed were those least suitable for the Socratic. I hope you will continue to pursue the subject. All good wishes

C.S.L.

TO MARY MARGARET MCCASLIN (W): TS

REF.238/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

15th May 1951.

Dear Mrs. McCaslin,

Thank you for your kind letter of the 11th.

A book of reference tells me that John Flavel came from Dartmouth and kept a private school.⁹² I have never heard of him before nor seen his books. But I have no difficulty in believing that he may be excellent. The past is full of good authors whom the general literary tradition has ignored and whom one only finds by chance. There is a great element of chance in fame. With all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE ROSTREVOR HAMILTON (BOD):

Magdalen

17/5/51

My dear Hamilton

Of course I’ll write an introduction to Ouroboros.⁹³ I’d deserve to be hanged if I wouldn’t. Mind you, one doesn’t always write best on what one most keenly and spontaneously enjoys. One writes best on the authors who are one’s acquired tastes (as happy love produces fewer great poems than mess and fuss like Donne’s or obsession like Catullus!) But I’ll do my damdest. When the matter is fixed (and I leave you to go on into that) can you come down for a night and talk it over? I shall want to pick your brains: especially for testimonies which I can quote from other admirers, yourself, and lames Stephens etc.⁹⁴ I remember the other Eddison v. well: give him my duty.⁹⁵

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD): TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th May 1951.

Dear Miss Pitter,

It is I who have to thank you for making my little party a success. You supplied the fire and air. I wrote down Young’s⁹⁶ address, and will write: many thanks. My own MS will go to you as soon as it is typed. Don’t let it be a bother: what I want is only a Yes or a No or Doubtful. It is very kind of you to undertake the job, for a job of course it is. Kindest regards to Miss O’Hara and yourself.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO ANDREW YOUNG (BOD):⁹⁷ TS

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th May 1951

Dear Canon Young,

May a stranger take the liberty of offering his thanks for your poems? You appear to me a modern Marvell and a modern marvel: there has been nothing so choice, so delicate, and so controlled in this century. Every weir I see in this town of rivers now ‘combs the river’s silver hair’.⁹⁸ Thank you very much indeed.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

25/5/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

About yr. idea that error in upbringing might be partly responsible for Genia’s trouble, does any trained psychologist agree with you? From what I hear such people say I shd. v. much doubt whether it cd. have had any ‘depth’ effect. Do not burden yourself with any unnecessary cares: I suspect you are not at all to blame. I pray for Genia every night.

About loving one’s country, you raise two different questions. About one, about there seeming to be (now) no reason for loving it, I’m not at all bothered. As Macdonald says ‘No one loves because he sees reason, but because he loves.’⁹⁹ Or say there are two kinds of love: we love wise & kind & beautiful people because we need them, but we love (or try to love) stupid & disagreeable people because they need us. This second kind is the more divine, because that is how God loves us: not because we are lovable but because He is love, not because He needs to receive but because He delights to give.

But the other question (what one is loving in loving a country) I do find v. difficult. What I feel sure of is that the personifications used by journalists and politicians have v. little reality. A treaty between the Govts. of two countries is not at all like a friendship between two people: more like a transaction between two people’s lawyers.

I think love for one’s country means chiefly love for people who have a good deal in common with oneself (language, clothes, institutions) and is in that way like love of one’s family or school: or like love (in a strange place) for anyone who once lived in one’s home town. The familiar is in itself a ground for affection. And it is good: because any natural help towards our spiritual duty of loving is good and God seems to build our higher loves round our merely natural impulses—sex, maternity, kinship, old acquaintance, etc. And in a less degree there are similar grounds for loving other nations—historical links & debts for literature etc (hence we all reverence the ancient Greeks). But I wd. distinguish this from the talk in the papers. Mind you, I’m in considerable doubt about the whole thing. My mind tends to move in a world of individuals not of societies.

I’m afraid I have not read E. Gough’s book.¹⁰⁰ With all blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO SEYMOUR SPENCER (P):

Magdalen College.

29/5/51

Dear Dr. Spencer

Thank you v. much for letting me see the MS. of your article.¹⁰¹ My reading confirms the view I formed on hearing the earlier form of it read, that it is a most interesting and important piece of work.

On p. 3, para 4 the first sentence is a little obscure. It might mean that we shd. expect the admission of conscious mind to exclude freedom but it doesn’t inevitably do so. I take it that is not what you meant. Wd. it run better ‘the mere admission of a conscious mind leaves open the possibility of freedom’?

I still disagree with yr. view that bodily procreation is a consequence of the Fall, taking my stand, if you like, on Aquinas (Summa Theol. Pars I^a. Quaest xcviii):¹⁰² and I think it a grave, tho’ not a fatal objection to your view that the same command crescite et multiplicamini¹⁰³ is addressed to beasts (Gen. I.22)¹⁰⁴ and to Man (ibid 1.28). But I hope your view will be published, and discussed by better authors than me. I’m sorry that I have no record of the Number of the XXth Century in wh. my article appeared: and as you see, the silly asses don’t put it on the off-print.

With all good wishes and many thanks.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO NATHAN COMFORT STARR (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29th May 1951

Dear Starr

This is the sort of thing that makes my blood boil. The events at Rollins College¹⁰⁵ seem to me to concentrate into one filthy amalgam every tendency in the modern world which I most hate and despise. And, as you say, this kind of thing will put an end to American scholarship if it goes on. Why then did I not cable to an American paper as you suggested?

My dear fellow, consider. What could unsolicited advice from a foreigner do except to stiffen the Wagnerian party by enlisting on its side every anti-British and every anti-God element in the state? You are asking me to damage a good cause by what would, from an unauthorised outsider like me, be simply impertinence. In a cooler moment (I don’t expect you to be cool at present) you will be thankful I didn’t. God help us all. It is terrible to live in a post-civilised age.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

Dear Starr

If you think there is anything to be gained by publishing my letter, you are at liberty to do so. My brother thanks you for your remembrances, and sends his lively sympathy.

But not the condemnatory part without the parts saying it wd. be impertinent of me to address a public on the matter.

C.S.L.

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

RER25/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

4th June 1951.

My dear Mr. Allen,

That perfection of packing, parcel no. 184 has just arrived, and I have spent a pleasant ten minutes dismembering it. Normally we won’t open your parcels when we get them, but reserve them for that moment of domestic crisis which so constantly arrives–‘We shall have to open one of Edward Allen’s parcels’ we say. But I tackled this one at once on account of the clothes.

The suit is just the thing I want for the summer, if there should happen to be a summer, which at the moment looks unlikely. (My brother skilfully annexed the last one you sent, and is still wearing it: on the strength of which he has the impudence to recommend this one to me)! Very welcome too was the sugar, for we are reduced to saccharine at the moment. We of course have our sugar ration, but it is never sufficient, and has to be ‘nursed’. I’ve no doubt that during the course of the week I shall find a grateful recipient for the dress. In fact an excellent parcel all round, for which I thank you very much.

Term is nearing its end in a whirlwind of work, and I shall be very glad to see the last of it. I always am, but this time especially, because I hope to be able to fit two holidays into the vacation—a week by the sea in the extreme west, Cornwall, a county I don’t know at all well, but which is very lovely: and then three weeks in the north of Ireland, two of them also seaside. I don’t think I have had so much holiday since I was a young man. I suppose you and Mrs. Allen will be thinking of going back to that bathing beach of yours? I looked with much envy last year at the photos you sent of yourselves there. We have already had quite a considerable American invasion of Oxford, and I’m sorry that our visitors will take away such a dreadful impression of our weather–for it can be fine in England in the early summer though not often. Of course Americans in Oxford are no novelty, but what I notice this year is the absence of the obviously very wealthy ones—who are I suppose on the continent; we are getting the nice, homely, quiet not so rich type (between ourselves a much nicer type), attracted I suppose by the devaluation of the pound. (On second thought I believe I should’nt have used the word ‘homely’. Does’nt it mean ugly in American? We mean by homely, just ordinary folk of our own kind of income etc.).

War and inflation are still the background of all ordinary conversation over here, to which has just been added the railway jam; our new railway organization has succeeded, so far as I can understand, in blocking every goods depot in the country. The tradespeople are grumbling, and the effect is just becoming apparent to the consumer.

With many good thanks, and kind remembrances to your Mother,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO SISTER PENELOPE CSMV(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

5/6/51

Dear Sister Penelope

My love for G. MacDonald has not extended to most of his poetry. I have naturally made several attempts to like it. Except for the Diary of An Old Soul¹⁰⁶ it won’t (so far as I’m concerned) do. I have looked under likely titles for the bit you quote but I have not found it. I will make further efforts and let you know if I succeed. I suspect the lines are not by him. Do you think they might be Christina Rosetti’s?

I’m very glad to hear the work is ‘roaring’ (a good translation, by the way, of fervet opus!)¹⁰⁷ and I much look forward to seeing the results. As for me I specially need your prayers because I am (like the pilgrim in Bunyan) travelling across ‘a plain called Ease’.¹⁰⁸ Everything without, and many things within, are marvellously well at present. Indeed (I do not know whether to be more ashamed or joyful at confessing this) I realise that until about a month ago I never really believed (tho’ I thought I did) in God’s forgiveness. What an ass I have been both for not knowing and for thinking I knew. I now feel that one must never say one believes or understands anything: any morning a doctrine I thought I already possessed may blossom into this new reality. Selah! But pray for me always, as I do for you. Will there be a chance of seeing you at Springfield St. Mary’s this summer?¹⁰⁹

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARTYN SKINNER (BOD):

As from Magdalen

June 11th 51

Dear Skinner—

I wouldn’t like you to think that Merlin¹¹⁰ has been out all these months without being both bought and read by me. What happened was that I did both shortly after its appearance and then lent it to a man who returned it only the other day. Since then I have re-read it. Any poem of yours is always a refreshment and I think this is better than any you’ve done yet. Of course part of my pleasure consists in agreement–idem sentire de república¹¹¹ (and about a good many other things too)–but I don’t think it can be discounted on that score. I am sure if I had found half so much wit and invention in any of the dreary modern-orthodox poems which from time to time I try dutifully to appreciate, I should be praising it volubly.

I think you waste a little time in Canto I (though symbol and plot as wholesale and retail is good) but I am thoroughly carried away by II. ‘Mute magnificent cascades of stair’¹¹² is heavenly—and the simile of that evening light in 6-8–and the entrance of Merlin.¹¹³ St.¹¹⁴ 55 is a good ‘un, too. Frivolous and imperceptive reference to a great modern critic in III 4 is soon swallowed up in the perfectly obvious (once it’s been done) yet stunningly effective rendering of lasciate etc. by no exit:¹¹⁵ wh. is grimmer than Dante’s own words. All the Tartarology—fiends being the perfect guinea pigs etc—good: and oh Bravíssímo at 40 (‘is still called “games’“).

But III 47 I don’t like. He couldn’t see the faces above him if he was in the front row of the dress circle, unless he turned round, could he? Well, a few at the sides. They wdn’t be the first thing. It just checked the formation of my mental picture for a second. In IV the inferred meeting is good: and ‘Macaulay’…of the wrong end (32) simply superb. St. 43 is real good thinking. You make a most dexterous use of the Miltonic background in V, especially of course at 14. I could have wished, not for less fun, but for more beauty about your angels. I thought we are starting it at 35 (splendid as far as it goes) but it died away too soon: and 37, like the fig-leaf in sculpture, rather emphasises than conceals the want. Or am I asking for impossibilities in such a poem. VI has a peculiar glory of its own: the relief and beauty of the transition from hell to earth in 45, 46.

I am longing to read the rest. I shd. think you are enjoying yourself. It is sickening to think how little chance of a fair hearing you have…and poor old Desmond Macarthy¹¹⁶ dying at the wrong moment! Fire-spitting Rowse may do more harm than good: indeed I myself can hardly feel the right side to be the right (and he only feels it to be the Right) when it is sponsored by him. But all good luck. Finish the poem whatever they don’t say. Will the tide ever turn?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen etc

11/6/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Genia’s letter is not yet to hand. I wish it were on any other subject. My job has always been to defend ‘mere Christianity’ against atheism and Pantheism: I’m no real good on ‘inter-denominational’ questions.

Walsh’s ‘not wholesome’¹¹⁷ cd. certainly be a bit hard if one took the words in the popular literary sense—in which ‘unwholesome’ suggests a faint smell of drains! But in the proper sense it is, surely, quite obviously true. The mind, like the body, will not thrive on an unbalanced diet. But–granted health and an adequate income, appetite itself will lead every one to a reasonably varied diet, without working it all out in vitamins, proteins, calories and what-not. In the same way I think inclination will usually guide a reasonable adult to a decently mixed literary diet. I wouldn’t recommend a planned concentration on me or any other writer.

There are lots of good religious works both in prose & verse waiting to correct & supplement whatever is over—or under—explained in me: a Kempis, Bunyan, Chesterton, Alice Meynell, Otto, Wm. Law, Coventry Patmore, Dante—

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO GENIA GOELZ (P/Z): ¹¹⁸

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

13/6/51

Dear Mrs. Goelz

(1)I think you are confusing the Immaculate Conception with the Virgin Birth. The former is a doctrine peculiar to the Roman Catholics and asserts that the mother of Jesus was born free of original sin. It does not concern us at all.

(2) The Virgin Birth is a doctrine plainly stated in the Apostles Creed that Jesus had no physical father, and was not conceived as a result of sexual intercourse. It is not a doctrine on which there is any dispute between Presbyterians as such and Episcopalians as such. A few individual Modernists in both these churches have abandoned it; but Presby-terianism or Episcopalianism in general, and in actual historical instances, through the centuries both affirm it. The exact details of such a miracle—an exact point at which a supernatural force enters this world (whether by the creation of a new spermatozoon, or the fertilisation of an ovum without a spermatozoon, or the development of a foetus without an ovum) are not part of the doctrine. These are matters in which no one is obliged and everyone is free, to speculate. Your starting point about this doctrine will not, I think, be to collect the opinions of individual clergymen, but to read Matthew Chap. I and Luke I and II.

(3) Similarly, your question about the resurrection is answered in Luke XXIV. This makes it clear beyond any doubt that what is claimed is physical resurrection. (All Jews except Sadducees already believed in spiritual revival—there would have been nothing novel or exciting in that.)

(4) Thus the questions that you raise are not questions at issue between real P. and real Ep. at all for both these claim to agree with Scripture. Neither church, by the way, seems to be very intelligently represented by the people you have gone to for advice, which is bad luck. I find it very hard to advise in your choice. At any rate the programme, until you can make up your mind, is to read your New Testament (preferably a modern translation) intelligently. Pray for guidance, obey your conscience, in small as well as great matters, as strictly as you can.

(5) Don’t bother much about your feelings. When they are humble, loving, brave, give thanks for them: when they are conceited, selfish, cowardly, ask to have them altered. In neither case are they you, but only a thing that happens to you. What matters is your intentions and your behaviour. (I hope all of this is not very dull and disappointing. Write freely again if I can be of any use to you.)

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

P.S. Of course God does not consider you hopeless. If He did He would not be moving you to seek Him (and He obviously is). What is going on in you at present is simply the beginning of the treatment. Continue seeking with cheerful seriousness. Unless He wanted you, you would not be wanting Him.

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

[The Kilns]

16/6/51

My dear Arthur

You’re right. Not that I shall be tired of hotels, still less of you, by then, but that I shall be feeling like getting down to a little work. Also I think you wd. find it a waste both of Lily¹¹⁹ and of me to have us together.

Love to the Unbelievable and to yourself.

Yours

Jack

TO WARFIELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

22/6/51

Dear Firor

I sympathise with you about my handwriting. I used to have a v. good one but no efforts will now recover it. I say! nothing could be nicer than the Hams. If it is not troublesome I’d like you to cancel the new order about Beef & Eggs and revert to the Hams. (We keep poultry and are alright about Eggs).

I don’t know about Deadlines. I somehow can’t quite believe in myself going to Wyoming¹²⁰–perhaps this is a case for psychoanalysis. Your patient who actually wants his Red Lizard¹²¹ fattened up is of course a disgusting old brute but is he also mad? By what sort of transaction did he propose to transfer his soul? And what value did he suppose it wd. have?

My brother is away so I have all the mail to cope with by hand. Therefore in haste.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROBERT C. WALTON (BBC): ¹²²

04/SB/RCW

Magdalen College,

Oxford

10/7/51

Dear Mr. Walton

I am afraid I couldn’t. The route by which I actually became a Theist (viâ subjectivism and as an escape from Solipsism, almost in Berkeley’s manner) could not be used for such a dialogue as you have in view. And also, like the old fangless snake in The Jungle Book,¹²³ I’ve largely lost my dialectical power. I am really very sorry. It sounds an excellent series and I wd. like to have been in it if I could.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

14/7/51

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

Yes: GEORGE HERBERT, Seventeenth Century religious poet: his book is called The Temple and is available in many modern reprints.

Yes: by Reason I meant ‘the faculty whereby we recognise or attain necessary truths’ or ‘the faculty of grasping self-evident truths or logically deducing those which are not self-evident’. I wd. not call the truths Reason any more than I wd. call colours Sight, or food Eating.

Yes: Christ is the eternal, unique 2nd Person of the Trinity: sharing His Sonship we can become sons of God in a real, but derived, manner.

I am v. sorry your husband is going through a bad time. You are all in my prayers. Thanks for the charming photos.

Yours very sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO RUTH PITTER(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

17/7/51

Dear Miss Pitter

Very many thanks for reading the MS. The idea that you should also thank [me] is to me fantastic: I was ‘making use of you’, you were a thermometer. The thermometer reading (print the good ones because they’re good and the bad ones because they’re bad) is intriguing: a line more easy to take about other people’s work than one’s own. One sees Huck’s point of view: the Widow, getting the house ready for a visitor would not have shared it.

I am lately back from Cornwall where I have been sailing for the first time. I think it is a way in which people who can’t dance can get some of what dancing was made to give. There’s nothing like water after all. Do you know David Lindsay’s lines explaining why there was no wine before the Flood—

The wattir was sae strung and fine Thei wald nat labour to mak wyne.¹²⁴

That is why they lived so long. Well, thank you. My duty to you both.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER(BOD):

REF.310/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

17th July 1951.

Dear Mr. Kinter,

The sardines, and the enormous tin of ham which you so very kindly sent me, have arrived in good condition, and I am most grateful to you for such a welcome gift; it could hardly have arrived more apropos, for I saw yesterday in the paper that our microscopic ration of bacon is shortly to be reduced by one ounce. Your ham will be of great service in tiding us over a lean period. It shall be consigned to the refrigerator until the time comes—though I was a little surprised to find the instruction that it needed refrigeration on the label; over here we never put canned goods into the frig., but just store them in the coolest part of a larder.

There is a larger number of American visitors in Oxford this year than usual, and I’m glad to say that they are having what—by our standards—is a very good summer. They are doing the Colleges very thoroughly, and putting us natives to shame daily by asking questions about them which we can’t answer. You never realize how little you know about your home town until you meet an intelligent visitor in it.

We are all very thankful—and you are no doubt more so—to see that at last there is some prospect of an end to this ghastly Korean war. Our only fear now is that it may be replaced by a Persian one; but it will be time enough to cross that river when we come to it.

With many thanks and all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W): TS

RER328/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

27th July 1951.

Dear Mrs. Jessup,

Thank you for your letter of the 21st. Someone (and someone I don’t even know) had been selected by Charles Williams as his biographer some time before his death, and is in possession of all the materials. So that is that! But don’t imagine you are losing anything. Biography is not in my line.

I agree most strongly with all you say about him, and wish someone really good could do him: but I would’nt, even if there were not another claimant in possession.

With all best wishes,

yours sincerely,

WH Lewis

Secretary.

(Dictated by Mr. Lewis)

TO THE EDITOR OF THE CHURCH TIMES (EC): ¹²⁵

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sir,—

Having read Mr. Bradbury’s letter on the Holy Name,¹²⁶ I have a few comments to make. I do not think we are entitled to assume that all who use this Name without reverential prefixes are making a ‘careless’ use of it; otherwise, we should have to say that the evangelists were often careless. I do not think we are entitled to assume that the use of the word Blessed when we speak of the Virgin Mary is ‘necessary’; otherwise, we should have to condemn both the Nicene and the Apostles’ Creed for omitting it.

Should we not rather recognise that the presence or absence of such prefixes constitute a difference, not in faith or morals, but simply in style? I know that their absence is irritating to others. Is not each party innocent in its temperamental preference but grossly culpable if it allows anything so subjective, contingent, and (with a little effort) conquerable as a temperamental preference to become a cause of division among brethren? If we cannot lay down our tastes, along with other carnal baggage, at the church door, surely we should at least bring them in to be humbled and, if necessary, modified, not to be indulged?

C. S. Lewis

TO I. O. EVANS (W): ¹²⁷

As from Magdalen College,

Oxford

4/8/51

Dear Evans

The Coming of a King¹²⁸ arrived most opportunely when I was in almost solitary confinement recovering from mumps, and I read it at two sittings. I think it not only the best but incomparably the best book you have done. The others interested me but this really set wires jangling. I congratulate you. And I think it is a great thing to put that idea of the Stone Age—which is at least as likely to be the true one—into boys’ heads instead of Well’s or Naomi Mitchison’s. It’s all good. The marriage customs are amusing, the Ogres exciting, and the Dark Faces with their quest just add the something more. I hope it will be a great success.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS C. VULLIAMY (W):¹²⁹ TS

RER347/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

10th August 1951.

Dear Mrs. Vulliamy,

Many thanks for your most kind and encouraging letter of the 4th. With all best wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO GEORGE SAYER(W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

15/8/51

You are treasures. Yes, I’d love to. The 15th Sept. week end (i.e. arrive 14th) if I may. Lovely.

I’ve just been having Mumps. Humphrey¹³⁰ kept on quoting me bits out of The Problem of Pain, which I call a bit thick. Love and deep thanks to both.

J

TO GENIA GOELZ (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

September 12, 1951

Dear Mrs Goelz

There is no doubt that laymen, and women, can baptise. The validity would, I suppose, depend on whether you regard the church into which the child is baptised as a part of the true church. I am very impressed that an Episcopalian will not accept Presbyterian baptism (and at the rudeness of his method) but I dare say he knows the rule. I fear I don’t. If I were you I would ask another (quieter and more amiable) Episcopalian parson. Personal animosities or friendships ought to have nothing to do with the question. In great haste.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen etc

Sept 12/1951

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

It is v. remarkable (or wd. be if we did not know that God arranges things) that you shd. write about our vicarious sufferings when another correspondent has recently written on the same matter.

I have not a word to say against the doctrine that Our Lord suffers in all the sufferings of His people (see Acts IX.6)¹³¹ or that when we willingly accept what we suffer for others and offer it to God on their behalf, then it may be united with His sufferings and, in Him, may help to their redemption or even that of others whom we do not dream of. So that it is not in vain: tho’ of course we must not count on seeing it work out exactly as we, in our present ignorance, might think best. The key text for this view is Colossians I.24.¹³² Is it not, after all, one more application of the truth that we are all ‘members of one another’?¹³³ I wish I had known more when I wrote the Problem of Pain.

God bless you all. Be sure that Grace flows into you and out of you and through you in all sorts of ways, and no faithful submission to pain in yourself or in another will be wasted.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS D. JESSUP (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sept 12/51

Dear Mrs. Jessup

Yes, I shd. jolly well think I have met that problem of the division between loving hearts when one comes to believe and have known something of it in my own life.¹³⁴ The poem on Galahad at Caerleon¹³⁵ touches it, doesn’t it? Our Lord foresaw it: see Luke XII 49-53.¹³⁶

I have not the ghost of anything that cd. be called a ‘solution’. Perhaps this pain cannot be avoided: is it not the tension between the Church and the World breaking out in each household. Sometimes the unconverted party, hitherto quite kind, becomes almost diabolical:^* but the other often wins him (or her) over in the end. (I don’t think you are conceited at all!)

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

Magdalen College,

Oxford,

England

Sept. 13th 1951

Dilectissime Pater—

Insolito gaudio affectus sum tuâ espistolâ et eo magis quod audivi te aegritudine laborare; interdum timui ne forte mortem obisses. Minime tamen cessavi ab orationibus pro te: ñeque enim debet illud Flumen Mortis duke commercium caritatis et cogitationum abolere. Nunc gaudeo quia credo (quamquam taces de valetudine–noli contemnere corpus, Fratrem Asinum, ut dixit Sanctus Franciscus!) tibi iam bene aut saltern melius esse. Mitto ad te fabulam meam nuper Italice versam; in qua sane magis lusi quam laboravi. Fantasiae meae liberas remisi habenas haud tamen (spero) sine respectu ad aedificationem et meam et proximi. Nescio utrum hujusmodi nugis dilecteris; at si non tu, fortasse quidam juvenis aut puella ex bonis tuis líberís amabit. Equidem post longam successionem modicorum morborum (quorum nomina Itálica nescio) iam valeo. Quinquagesimum diem natalem sacerdotii tui gratu-lationibus, precibus, benedictionibus saluto. Vale. Oremus pro invicem semper in hoc mundo et in futuro.

C. S. Lewis

*

Magdalen College,

Oxford,

England

Sept 13th 1951

Dearest Father—

I was moved with unaccustomed joy by your letter and all the more because I had heard you were ill; sometimes I feared lest you had perhaps died.

But never in the least did I cease from my prayers for you; for not even the River of Death ought to abolish the sweet intercourse of love and meditations.

Now I rejoice because I believe (although you keep silent about your health—do not condemn the body: Brother Ass, as St Francis said!)¹³⁷I believe you are well or at least better.

I am sending you my tale recently translated into Italian in which, frankly, I have rather played than worked.¹³⁸I have given my imagination free rein yet not, I hope, without regard for edification—for building up both my neighbour and myself. I do not know whether you will like this kind of trifle. But if you do not, perhaps some boy or girl will like it from among your ‘good children’.

For myself, after a long succession of minor illnesses (I do not know their Italian names) I am now better.

I salute the fiftieth anniversary of your priesthood with congratulations, prayers and blessings. Farewell. May we always pray for one another both in this world and in the world to come.

C. S. Lewis

TO BERNARD ACWORTH (W): ¹³⁹

Magdalen College,

Oxford

13th Sept. 1951

Dear Acworth–

I have read nearly the whole of Evolution¹⁴⁰ and am glad you sent it. I must confess it has shaken me: not in my belief in evolution, which was of the vaguest and most intermittent kind, but in my belief that the question was wholly unimportant. I wish I was younger. What inclines me now to think that you may be right in regarding it as the central and radical lie in the whole web of falsehood that now governs our lives, is not so much your arguments against it as the fanatical and twisted attitudes of its defenders. The section on Anthropology was especially good.

I am just back from Ireland where I have had the great pleasure of meeting an old friend of yours—Conway Ross. He told me you were one of the only two men who ever ‘talked him down’ and he hoped I wd. be the third. This hope was disappointed: ‘faith he gave me little chance to fulfil it. But he’s a grand chap and a man of my totem.’

The point that the whole economy of nature demands simultaneity of at least a v. great many species is a v. strong one. Thanks: and blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Sept 15th. 1951

Dear Miss Mathews

I will convey your kind message to my brother. St. Ives (it was my friends’ choice, not mine) isn’t the tucked-away and time-forgotten nook you picture, but a good deal spoiled by holiday-makers.

Since then, I have been really in quiet and almost unearthly spots in my native Ireland. I stayed for a fortnight in a bungalow which none of the peasants will approach at night because the desolate coast on which it stands is haunted by ‘the Good People’. There is also a ghost but (and this is interesting) they don’t seem to mind him: the faerie are a more serious danger.

I am told that fewer Americans than usual visited England this year so the Festival, from that point of view, was a failure: it was, in any case, a silly business. With all sympathy, blessings, and, as always, thanks.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford

24/9/51

Dear Mr Kinter

I have been in Ireland, revisiting the haunts and some of the friends of my boyhood, and that is why your letter of Aug 22nd. has been so long unanswered. A ham is not a ‘small thing’, but a glorious creature. If the shortages within our English ‘Tin Curtain’ did not affect others so much more grievously than me, I could almost give thanks for a state of affairs which restores to men in their fifties a healthy schoolboyish interest in eating. It gives us a chance (which I fear I often forget to take) of making grace before meals a reality.

I rather envy your visit to Boethius’ tomb:¹⁴¹ but perhaps his shade wd. be more pleased if I re-read the Consolatio.¹⁴²

My Numznor was a mispelling: it ought to be Numenor.¹⁴³ The private mythology to which it belongs grew out of the private language which Tolkien had invented: a real language with roots and sound-laws such as only a great philologist cd. invent. He says he found that it was impossible to invent a language without at the same time inventing a mythology: he adds that Muller was wrong in calling mythology a ‘disease of language’¹⁴⁴ and that it wd. be truer to say that language was a disease of mythology. I don’t quite understand that.

The private mythology ‘clicked’ with this world at the moment when the participle atlan (fallen or shattered) which had been produced by sound laws with no anticipation of what it wd. lead to, when applied to the vanished land of Numenor, turned out to be so obviously connected with our vanished land of Atlantis. A letter to him direct (J. R. R. Tolkien, Merton College, Oxford) wd., I am sure, give pleasure and elicit a full and most interesting reply.

I am so glad you liked the Lion: there will be another children’s story in November. With v. many thanks & good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College

Oxford

27/9/51

Excellent. Will Tu. Oct. 30th do? RSVP.

J.

TO BERNARD ACWORTH (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

4/10/51

Dear Acworth–

No, I’m afraid. I shd. lose much and you wd. gain almost nothing by my writing you a preface. No one who is in doubt about your views on Darwin wd. be impressed by testimony from me, who am known to be no scientist. Many who have been or are being moved towards Christianity by my books wd. be deterred by finding that I was connected with anti-Darwinism.

I hope (but who knows himself!) that I wd. not allow myself to be influenced by this consideration if it were only my personal success as an author that was endangered. But the cause I stand for wd. be endangered too. When a man has become a popular Apologist he must watch his step. Everyone is on the look out for things that might discredit him. Sorry.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

Lewis had been working on Volume III of the Oxford History of English Literature, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, since 1936. Beginning with the Michaelmas Term of 1951, Magdalen College gave him a year off to complete the hook. He did no teaching during that time.

Prince Caspian: The Return to Narnia was published by Geoffrey Bles of London on 15 October.

TO MRS JESSUP(W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

15/10/51

Dear Mrs. Jessup–

I agree with everything you say (except that I shd. publish anything on the subject: a bachelor is not the man to do it—there is such an obvious answer to anything he says!).

Our regeneration is a slow process. As Charles Williams says there are three stages: (1.) The Old Self on the Old Way. (2.) The Old Self on the new Way. (3.) The New Self on the New Way.

After conversion the Old Self can of course be just as arrogant, importunate, and imperialistic about the Faith as it previously was about any other interest. I had almost said ‘Any other Fad’–for just as the loveliest complexion turns green in a green light, so the Faith itself may have at first all the characteristics of a Fad and we may be as ill to live with as if we had taken up Nudism or Psychoanalysis or Pure Wool Clothing. You and I, clearly, both know all about that: one makes blunders.

About obedience, the principle is clear. Obedience to man is limited by obedience to God and, when they really conflict, must go. But of course that gives one v. little guidance about particulars. The converted party must pray: I suppose it is not often necessary to pray in the presence of the other! Especially if the converted party is the woman, who usually has the house to herself all day. Of course there must be no concealment, in the sense that if the question comes up one must say frankly that one does pray. But there is a difference between not concealing and flaunting. For the rest (did I quote this before?) MacDonald says ‘the time for speaking seldom arrives, the time for being never departs.’¹⁴⁵ Let you and me pray for each other.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

RER64/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

18th October 1951.

Dear Miss Mathews,

Your nice parcel of the 6th September has just arrived, and has I see been opened by our Customs people—which rarely happens. What they saw suspicious about it I can’t imagine. I suppose what happens is that they open one parcel in every hundred or so as a routine check.

I feel sure that you won’t be offended if I tell you that I have—with great reluctance—sent your gift straight on to some one else, whose need is much greater than mine. It has gone to a particularly hard hit member of the most unfortunate class in this country: an elderly lady (65), who has always had a struggle to make ends meet, and who, owing to a failure of dividends, is now on the verge of actual want. No doubt you have seen in the papers that we are caught in what the economists call ‘an inflationary spiral’; so far this has not apparently touched the working classes, but amongst the elderly, living on dwindling investment income in a world of rising prices, there is already discomfort, hardship, and I fear in many cases, real suffering. And to the lady in question, your parcel will be a real Godsend.

Our elections take place this day week, and I shall not be sorry when they are over. Already everything possible seems to have been said by every possible candidate, and the reiteration becomes wearisome. There seem to be good prospects of putting Labour out, in spite of the fact that they are promising the earth, whereas Churchill, with his usual good sense, is promising nothing but hard times.

I hope you are keeping well; we both are. With many thanks (should I also say apologies?), and all good wishes,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO WENDELL W. WAITERS (P):¹⁴⁶ TS¹⁴⁷

REF.413/51

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

25th October 1951.

Dear Mr. Watters,

Yes. I am not surprised that a man who agreed with me in Screwtape (ethics served with an imaginative seasoning) might disagree with me when I wrote about religion. We can hardly discuss the whole matter by post, can we?

I’ll only make one shot. When people object, as you do, that if lesus was God as well as Man, then He had an unfair advantage which deprives Him for them of all value, it seems to me as if a man struggling in the water shd refuse a rope thrown to him by another who had one foot on the bank, saying ‘Oh, but you have an unfair advantage’; it is because of that advantage that He can help.¹⁴⁸

But all good wishes: we must just differ: in charity I hope. You must not be angry with me for believing you know: I’m not angry with you!

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO HARRY BLAMIRES (BOD): TS

RER401//51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

29th October 1951.

Dear Blamires,

I hope my refusal will rank as a very ‘flat’ one.¹⁴⁹I am struggling with a preface for another book at the moment and wishing I’d never undertaken it!¹⁵⁰ I don’t believe I would really do you any good, for [I] think the Educational world is rather anti-me. I could write a paragraph– the sort of thing that comes out in the catalogue or on the dust jacket. I’m sorry. But I must get out of these ‘little jobs one after another’ that, in the aggregate, really cripple one.

Yours,

C. S. Lewis

TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): PC

Magdalen College

Oxford

5/11/51

How is the Back? And if it is better, cd. you come and dine with me on Wed. next 7 (not dressed: call in my rooms at 7. sharp) or, if that is not convenient, cd. you lunch at 1 o’clock the same day? My duty to your wife

C. S. Lewis

TO HERBERT PALMER (TEX): ¹⁵¹

20/11/51

‘To which’ [i.e. to Rhetoric] ‘poetry would be made subsequent, or indeed rather precedent, as being less subtle and fine, but more simple, sensuous, and passionate’–Tractate on Education (Prose Wks, Bohn’s Edtn. Vol. Ill, p. 473.)¹⁵²

Bad luck on ‘impassioned’ wh. he certainly did NOT say, whatever E.S. may think. I imagine, tho’, that passionate and impassioned meant v. nearly the same.

I’m afraid I never see the Fortnightly, but will look out for yr. article if I do.¹⁵³ I am v. sorry you have been so ill and hope there is a better time coming. I’m alright. Blessings–

C.S.L.

TO I. O. EVANS (W):

Magdalen etc.

27/11/51

Dear Evans

(I wish you wouldn’t doctor or mister me!) I was a pig not to send you a Caspian, but you know how, at the moment of making out one’s list one has first 3 names wh. some recent event makes obvious, and after those one can only think either of 100 people or no one. I now rectify the omission. I am delighted that it pleased you. I look forward v. much to the ‘booklets’. The conception sounds excellent and, I hope they will be a great success.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO WILLIAM L. KINTER(BOD): TS

REF.310/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

27th November 1951.

Dear Mr. Kinter,

Thank you for your kind letter of the 19th. What it is to have a real reader! No one else sees that the first book is Ransom’s enfances:¹⁵⁴if they notice a change at all, they complain that in the later ones he ‘loses the warm humanity of the first’ etc.

All the best.

Yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO MISS TUNNICLIFF (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Dec 1st 1951

Dear Miss Tunnicliff

(1.) Oddly enough I have more than once thought of writing on the Problem of Pleasure. As for the title and subject of my actual book¹⁵⁵ [they] were not of my own independent choice: I had been asked to deal with that subject for a series.¹⁵⁶

(2.) ‘Rough male taste’¹⁵⁷ is, of course, a metaphor. It still seems to me the right one—but of course all metaphors are touch-and-go and don’t appeal equally to all imaginations.

(3.) I did try so to write as to make people less angry. To say that they might be angry was part of the attempt.

(4.) You think I don’t go far enough about animals: others think I go too far. If I had gone as far as you wd. like I shd. have raised more incredulity. Yes—my treatment of freedom was crude & hasty.

(5.) No, I don’t think I can frame every sentence for reading aloud in mixed company. I think books on such subjects are best read in solitude.

With all good wishes.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

In his unpublished biography of his brother, most of which became Letters of C. S. Lewis (1966), Warnie Lewis wrote: ‘On 3rd December 1951 Jack received a letter from the Prime Minister [Winston Churchill] offering to recommend him for a C.B.E. in the New Year Honour’s List. Here is his reply:’¹⁵⁸

TO THE PRIME MINISTER’S SECRETARY (P):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

[4 December] 1951

I feel greatly obliged to the Prime Minister, and so far as my personal feelings are concerned this honour would be highly agreeable. There are always however knaves who say, and fools who believe, that my religious writings are all covert anti-Leftist propaganda, and my appearance in the Honours List would of course strengthen their hands. It is therefore better that I should not appear there. I am sure the Prime Minister will understand my reason, and that my gratitude is and will be none the less cordial.

TO EDWARD A. ALLEN (W): TS

REF.25/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

6th December 1951.

My dear Mr. Allen,

As I entered my rooms this morning I was cheered by the sight of a parcel, so admirably packed, that I did’nt have to look at the label to see who was the kind friend who had sent it. How do you do it? I’ve been trying for years to learn how to make up a package, and still have’nt progressed sufficiently in the art to produce one that I would trust to cross the street. I need hardly say how grateful I am to you for it, coming as it does at a moment when the new government—very rightly by the way—has refused to woo the electors by playing Father Christmas with a food bonus.

It appears from information given in Parliament that Labour’s food gifts to the country in December were really only available by cutting the rations in other months, and this Churchill does’nt propose to do. But what a mess the world is in, is’nt it? In some respects you must feel it even worse than we do; you are of course better off materially, but we at least have’nt a full-scale war on our hands. And one to which I can’t see any end, for I take it that if peace is made in Korea—which does’nt look very likely—it will merely be the prelude to an attack on France in Indo-China or ourselves in Malaya. But we can’t do anything about it except pray, so there is no use in grumbling.

After the wettest November on record, with floods all down the Thames valley, we have settled down into a crisp December, and are enjoying it. There is of course the usual coal shortage, but that does’nt worry us much, for we have a good deal of timber about the place, and my brother and I do our own coal mining with axe and saw. So do the neighbours, drat ‘em, but its impossible to patrol the place day and night; but as King Louis XV used to say, ‘things as they are will last out my time’.

With all best wishes to you and your mother for a happy Christmas from both of us, and with very many thanks,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

TO VERA MATHEWS (W): TS

RER64/51.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

12th December 1951.

Dear Miss Mathews,

Many thanks for your letter of the 8th:–

Texas certainly does’nt sound attractive, but you seem to have got some enjoyment out of it; my brother says he has an idea that this is the one which calls itself the Lone Star State, and that its inhabitants–like the Scots and the Jews—are always making up good stories against themselves, e.g. that when America entered the war, Texas wired the President ‘Texas joins with U.S.A. in fight for freedom’.

Yes, we have been exceedingly lucky (in more senses than one) over your parcels, and the customs took no notice of the things you mention; I think with all articles they take the view that as long as you are not making a business of it, a little of this that or the other thing may now be passed. But this is only a guess, I really don’t know.

Of course I’ll try my hand at commenting on a short story, but don’t attach much importance to what I say. I’ve never had any professional (i.e. academical) connection with modern literature, and the short story is a genre I’m particularly bad on. That is, I accept the job, not because I can do it, but because you have such high claim to anything we can even try to do.

With all best wishes from us both to you both for a happy Christmas and a prosperous New Year,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis

P.S. My brother asks me to add that he too looks forward to seeing the story, and that unfortunately he does’nt know India at all; he was once under orders to go there for five years, but with his usual ingenuity, managed to persuade the War Office to send him to West Africa for twelve months instead.

TO WARHELD M. FIROR(BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford Dec.

20th 1951

My dear Firor

How the years flick past at our time of life: don’t they: like telegraph posts seen from an express train: and how they crawled once, when the gulf between one Christmas and another was too wide almost for a child’s eye to see across. If ever I write a story about a long-liver, like Haggard’s She or the Wandering Jew¹⁵⁹ (and I might) I shall make that point. The first century of his life will, to the end, seem to him longer than all that have followed it: the Norman Conquest, the discovery of America and the French Revolution are all muddled up in his mind as recent events.

My year ‘off’ has been, as it was meant to be, so far a year of very hard work, but mostly congenial. The book really begins to look as if it might be finished in 1952 and I am, between ourselves, pleased with the manner of it—but afraid of hidden errors. In that way I rather envy you for being engaged in empirical inquiry where, I suppose, mistakes rise up in the laboratory and proclaim themselves. But a mistake in a history of literature walks in silence till the day it turns irrevocable in a printed book and the book goes for review to the only man in England who wd. have known it was a mistake. This, I suppose, is good for one’s soul: and the kind of good I must learn to digest. I am going to be (if I live long enough) one of those men who was a famous writer in his forties and dies unknown—like Christian going down into the green valley of humiliation.¹⁶⁰ Which is the most beautiful thing in Bunyan and can be the most beautiful thing in life if a man takes it quite rightly–a matter I think and pray about a good deal. One thing is certain: much better to begin (at least) learning humility on this side of the grave than to have it all as a fresh problem on the other. Anyway, the desire wh. has to be mortified is such a vulgar and silly one.

Most of us are v. much cheered by having got rid of the Labour government and at finding that we have done so without yet plunging into a period of strikes and sedition and ‘cold’ revolution, which we feared. There are some, not Labour, who feel quite differently. Have you ever heard of Captain Bernard Acworth R. N., a distinguished submarine commander in World War I and v. good Christian of the Evangelical type—but his head absolutely buzzing with Bees? He was with me the other day explaining that the whole American-English-UNO¹⁶¹ set up is absolutely fatal and part of a plot engineered (so far as I cd. make out) by the Kremlin, the Vatican, and Jews, the Freemasons and–subtlest foe of all—the Darwinians. So I suppose you must be in it too. But there was a core of rationality in it. He thinks our strategy ought to be purely naval, that we can ruin ourselves by trying to keep up an army in Europe and, even so, cannot succeed on those lines.

Have you given up visiting these parts? I (and others) have a very warm memory of your one descent upon Oxford and would greatly welcome another. You are a naturally mobile organism, you know, unlike me. Whether you come or not, all very best wishes and, as always, hearty thanks. I’m sorry for the handwriting: the harder I try, the worse it gets now-a-days.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

E Collegio S. Mariae Magdalenae

apud Oxonienses

Die S. Stephani MCMLI[26 December 1951]

Dilectissime Pater

Grato animo epistulam tuam hodie accepi et omnia bona spir-itualia et temporalia tibi in Domino invoco. Mihi in praeterito anno accidit magnum gaudium quod quamquam difficile est verbis exprimere conabor.

Mirum est quod interdum credimus nos credere quae re verâ ex corde non credimus. Diu credebam me credere in remissionem peccatorum. Ac subito (in die S. Marci) haec veritas in mente mea tam manifesto lumine apparuit ut perciperem me numquam antea (etiam post multas confessiones et absolutiones) toto corde hoc credidisse. Tantum distat inter intellectûs mera affirmatio et illa fides medullitus infixa et quasi palpabilis quam apostolus scripsit esse substantiam.

Fortasse haec liberatio concessa est tuis pro me intercessionibus! Confortat me ad dicendum tibi quod vix débet laicus ad sacerdotem, junior ad seniorem, dicere. (Attamen ex ore infantium: immo olim ad Balaam ex ore asini!). Hoc est: multum scribes de tuis peccatis. Cave (liceat mihi, dilectissime pater, dicere cave) ne humilitas in anxietatem aut tristitiam transeat. Mandatum est gaude et semper gaude. Jesus abolevit chirographiam quae contra nos erat. Sursum corda! Indulge mihi, precor, has balbutiones. Semper in meis orationibus et es et eris. Vale.

C. S. Lewis

*

from the College of St Mary Magdalen

Oxford

St Stephen’s Day [26 December] 1951

Dearest Father

Thank you for the letter which I have received from you today and I invoke upon you all spiritual and temporal blessings in the Lord.

As for myself, during the past year a great joy has befallen me. Difficult though it is, I shall try to explain this in words. It is astonishing that sometimes we believe that we believe what, really, in our heart, we do not believe.

For a long time I believed that I believed in the forgiveness of sins. But suddenly (on St Mark’s day)¹⁶² this truth appeared in my mind in so clear a light that I perceived that never before (and that after many confessions and absolutions) had I believed it with my whole heart.

So great is the difference between mere affirmation by the intellect and that faith, fixed in the very marrow and as it were palpable, which the Apostle wrote was substance.¹⁶³

Perhaps I was granted this deliverance in response to your intercessions on my behalf!

This emboldens me to say to you something that a layman ought scarcely to say to a priest nor a junior to a senior. (On the other hand, out of the mouths of babes:¹⁶⁴ indeed, as once to Balaam, out of the mouth of an ass!)¹⁶⁵ It is this: you write much about your own sins. Beware (permit me, my dearest Father, to say beware) lest humility should pass over into anxiety or sadness. It is bidden us to ‘rejoice and always rejoice’.¹⁶⁶ lesus has cancelled the handwriting which was against us.¹⁶⁷ Lift up our hearts!

Permit me, I pray you, these stammerings. You are ever in my prayers and ever will be.

Farewell.

C. S. Lewis

1 1 Timothy 2:1: ‘I exhort therefore, that, first of all, supplications, prayers, intercessions, and giving of thanks, be made for all men.’

2 Many of these thoughts were later to go into Lewis’s essay, ‘The Efficacy of Prayer’, published in Fern-seed and Elephants and Other Essays on Christianity, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1975; Fount, 1998).

3 Vanauken had asked Lewis his opinion as to whether he should continue with his postgraduate work in history or study theology.

4 Francis Bacon, Essays (1625), ‘Of Atheism’: ‘The great atheists, indeed are hypocrites; which are ever handling holy things, but without feeling; so as they must needs be cauterized in the end.’

5 Pauline Baynes was illustrating the Narnian books.

6 At a meeting with Geoffrey Bles in London on 1 January 1951 Lewis gave Pauline Baynes a map he had drawn of Narnia bordered on the north by the ‘Wild Lands of the North’ as well as his drawing of a Monopod. In this letter he refers to that map which is in the Bodleian Library. (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/1, fol. 160), and is reproduced by the Bodleian as a postcard. Baynes used Lewis’s original map to draw (1) ‘A Map of Narnian and Adjoining Lands’ which appeared on the endpapers of Prince Caspian; (2) a map of the Bight of Calormen and the Lone Islands of the Great Eastern Ocean which appeared on the endpapers of The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’ (1952); (3) ‘A Map of the Wild Lands of the North’ which appeared on the endpapers of The Silver Chair (1953); and (4) a map on the endpapers of The Horse and His Boy (1954) showing the position of Tashbaan, the Desert and Archenland.

7 George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, 2nd series (1885), ‘The Fear of God’, p. 163.

8 See Percy Howard Newby, writer and broadcasting administrator, in the Biographical Appendix.

9 Newby, Organizer of Third Programme Talks for the BBC, had written to Lewis on 9 February 1951: ‘From time to time we broadcast in the Third Programme talks under the general title of “Work in Progress”, the general idea being that scholars and critics should discuss the nature and scope of a particular book they are engaged upon. We should be very happy if you would talk in this way about the volume you are preparing for the Oxford History of English Literature.’

10 William Lewis Kinter (1915–) was born in St Thomas, Pennsylvania, on 21 October 1915. He took a BA in English from Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania, in 1938, another BA from Yale University in 1940, and a PhD from Columbia University, New York, in 1958. He taught Latin and English at Westminster School, Hartford, Connecticut, 1944-6, was Assistant Professor of English at Muhlenberg College, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 1946-62, and Associate Professor of English at Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland, 1962-78. From there he became Chairman of the Department of Language and Literature at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. He is the author, with loseph R. Keller, of The Sibyl: Prophetess of Antiquity and Medieval Fay (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1967).

11 Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919), Lewis’s first book, was published under the pseudonym ‘Clive Hamilton’. See CL I, p. 443n.

12 Dymer, with a preface by the author (London: Dent; New York: Macmillan, 1950).

13 i.e. Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength.

14 Ludovico Ariosto (1474-1535) was the author of Orlando Furioso (1532). See The Allegory of Love, Ch 7, Sect. 1, pp. 312-13).

15 Bernardus Silvestris, De Mundi Universitate, ed. Carl Sigmund Barach and lohann Wrobel (Innsbruck: Verlag der Wagner’schen Universitats-Buchhandlung, 1876).

16 Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-69), American general and President of the United States, 1953-61, who launched the invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944 and oversaw the final defeat of Germany. In 1950 President Truman asked Eisenhower to become supreme commander of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and in 1951 he flew to Paris to assume his new position. For the next fifteen months he devoted himself to the task of creating a united military organization in western Europe to be a defence against the possibility of Communist aggression.

17 On Mrs Alice Hamilton Moore (1853-1939), see CL II, p. 281n.

18 Rider Haggard, She (1887); Ayesha (1905); She and Allan (1921); Wisdom’s Daughter (1923).

19 After Greeves’s mother died in 1949 he moved from the family home, ‘Bernagh’ in Belfast, to a cottage at Silver Hill, Crawfordsburn, Co. Down, about twelve miles from Belfast. When he visited Arthur there, Lewis always stayed at the Old Inn, Crawfordsburn.

20 When Roger Lancelyn Green’s father died in 1947, Roger, his eldest son, became the 31st Lord of Poulton, and in August 1950 he moved with his wife and son from Oxford to the family home, Poulton Hall, Poulton-Lancelyn, Bebington, Wirral, Cheshire.

21 The Festival of Britain was opened by King George VI in London on 3 May 1951, six years after the end of the Second World War. It was designed to celebrate the best of British art, design and industry, and raise the nation’s spirits after the austerity of the war years. More than eight million people visited the exhibition over a period of five months.

22 Frederick lames Eugene Woodbridge, An Essay on Nature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1940).

23 See Cecil Day-Lewis in the Biographical Appendix.

24 BF, p. 239.

25 See Dr Seymour Jamie Gerald Spencer in the Biographical Appendix.

26 Eric Fromm (1900-80), German-born American psychoanalyst who studied the role of social conditioning in human behaviour.

27 This was Lewis’s essay, ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’, in 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, vol. Ill, no. 3 (1949), pp. 5-12 and subsequently in Res Judicatae, VI (June 1953), pp. 224-30, and The Churchman, LXXIII (April-June 1959), pp. 55-60. It was reprinted in First and Second Things, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount, 1985) and EC.

28 ‘Mrs Lockley’ is the pseudonym Warnie Lewis gave this correspondent in L and WHL. See CL II, p. 975n. The woman is yet to be identified.

29 Green had been reading the manuscript of what became The Silver Chair, and he had questioned whether the wood fire Puddleglum tramples on in Chapter 12 would go out. In the end, Lewis did not specify what kind of fire it was, and he simply let Puddleglum ‘stamp on the fire, grinding a large part of it into ashes on the flat hearth’.

30 Paul Capon, The Other Side of the Sun (1950).

31 Period of two days.

32 Ruth Pitter, Urania (1950). This volume of poems was a selection from Pitter’s A Trophy of Arms: Poems 1926-35 (1936), The Spirit Watches (1939) and The Bridge (1945).

33 Urania contains an engraving by Joan Hassall. At the feet of the Muse there is a vine branch based on those at Pitter’s farm in Essex.

34 Thomas Traherne (c. 1636-74), Centuries of Meditation (1908), First Century, 27.

35 See Colin and Christian Hardie in the Biographical Appendix. In ‘Three Letters from C. S. Lewis’, The Chesterton Review, XVII, nos. 3 and 4 (August/November 1991), p. 393, Christian Hardie commented: ‘The three letters…relate to the two novels which I lent to C. S. Lewis. He had revealed one day at lunch with us, that he had read no book by Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene. I said that he should try to catch up with the contemporary scene, and that I would lend him some books which were currently read and admired. The first, in March 1951, was Brideshead Revisited. Treating this as a Lenten penance, a year later he asked for another and got The Power and the Glory. He could easily have returned the books with only a verbal message; characteristically, he took the trouble to write a letter.’

36 Lewis took Hardie’s advice and read Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945). The novel is told in the first person by Charles Ryder, a fellow-student at Oxford of Lord Sebastian Flyte, a member of an ancient Roman Catholic family. Sebastian takes Charles to the home of his family, Brideshead Castle, where he meets the rest of the Flyte family. Sebastian has an elder brother, Lord Brideshead, and two sisters, Julia and Cordelia. His mother, the devout Lady Marchmain, refuses to divorce Lord Marchmain, who is living in Venice with his mistress. Lady Marchmain attempts to enlist Charles’s help in preventing Sebastian’s drinking, but Sebastian escapes to North Africa where, after his mother’s death, he becomes a saintly down-and-out. Charles falls in love with Lady lulia, but in the end the power of the Church reclaims her and they part for ever.

37 Samuel Butler, Erewhon (1872).

38 Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy (1817).

39 James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824).

40 Stephen McKenna, The Confessions of a Well-Meaning Woman (1922).

41 G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (1909), ch. 2: ‘You can make a story out of a hero among dragons; but not out of a dragon among dragons.’

42 When Charles Ryder is stationed near Brideshead Castle near the end of the war, one of his platoon commanders is named Hooper. The man epitomizes everything Ryder—and Waugh—hate. ‘In the weeks that we were together,’ says Charles in the Prologue to Brideshead Revisited, ‘Hooper became a symbol to me of Young England, so that whenever I read some public utterance proclaiming what Youth demanded in the Future and what the world owed to Youth, I would test these general statements by substituting “Hooper” and seeing if they still seemed as plausible.’

43 Constantin Levin is a character in Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina (1873-82).

44 Characters in Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1863-9).

45 Archdeacon Grantly is a prominent character in the ‘Barsetshire’ novels of Anthony Trollope.

46 Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby (1844).

47 Edward Frederic Benson (1871-1914), whose novels include Dodo (1893).

48 Railway.

49 Lewis was planning to travel the (roughly) twelve miles from Oxford Street, Belfast, to Helen’s Bay, near Crawfordsburn.

50 Douglas Edison Harding (1909–) was born in Lowestoft, Suffolk, on 12 February 1909 and educated at Lowestoft Grammar School and University College, London. In a letter to Walter Hooper of 11 August 2005, he said: ‘My parents were Exclusive Plymouth Brethren. I apostacised from them at the ripe age of 21. Though I earned my living as an architect, my real job and passion has been the Perennial Philosophy and research into my True Identity, plus sharing my discoveries with as many people as possible worldwide by means of workshops and books.’ Harding is the author of many books, including The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe (1952), The Little Book of Life and Death (1988), Religions of the World (1966), The Trial of the Man Who Said He Was God (1992), and the best known of all his books, On Having No Head: A Contribution to Zen in the West (1961).

51 Lewis was reading the manuscript of what was published as D. E. Harding, The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth: A New Diagram of Man in the Universe, with a preface by C. S. Lewis (London: Faber, 1952). Lewis’s preface was reprinted as ‘The Empty Universe’ in Present Concerns, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Fount, 1986) and EC.

52 ibid., ch. 9, ix, pp. 95-6: ‘Only beings who consider the possibility of breaking laws can comply with them. Earth does both. To determine her orbit, the scientist supposes that, disobeying for a while the law of gravity and obeying the law of inertia, she flies off at a tangent; and that then, reversing her disobedience, she falls towards the sun; and he adds that these illegalities are in practice so brief that her ratchet-shaped path is smoothed out into the compromise of a curve, which respects both laws alike. Now I take this mathematics more seriously than the scientist himself; for (a) I link Earth, not merely with the original data and the final result of the calculation, but with the intermediate stages as well, and (b) I say that all three are her function.’

53 ibid., ch. 18, vii, p. 188.

54 In Lewis’s interplanetary trilogy, eldila (singular, eldil) are angels who inhabit ‘Deep Heaven’. Their bodies are as swift as light, and hence they are usually invisible to human beings. They are first mentioned in Out of the Silent Planet, ch. 13. See the letter to Mary Willis Shelburne of 4 March 1953.

55 Perelandra (London: Bodley Head, 1943; HarperCollins, 2000), ch. 17, p. 223.

56 ‘The “ferly” ‘, wrote Pitter, ‘is a sort of vision in the engraving by Joan Hassall…the figure of the Muse stands with flowers & vine-leaves in her arms, in the calm twilight landscape full of symbols: she points downward to a kind of visionary sphere containing images of violence: it is this that someone thought was like a concrete-mixer’ (Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 100).

57 Pitter said of this: ‘I had expressed mild pain at the idea of the spectacle-case lurking so long undiscovered in the crease of the armchair. Never cleaned—didn’t know they had to be?!!!’ (MS. Eng. lett. c. 220/3, fol. 100).

58 Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking-Glass (1872), ch. 4, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’: ‘“The time has come,” the Walrus said,/”To talk of many things:/Of shoes—and ships—and sealing wax–/Of cabbages—and kings

59 Cardinal Schwanda was the Sayers’ cat.

60 Homer (fl. 8th century BC) is the author of the Greek epics, The Odyssey and The Iliad.

61 ‘The same rule applies to things that do not exist and to things that are not apparent.’ This is a standard legal maxim.

62 Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers (1857), ch. 40: ‘The painter put a veil over Agamemnon’s face when called on to depict the father’s grief at the early doom of his devoted daughter.’

63 Nicholas Hardie (b. 12 November 1945), to whom The Silver Chair is dedicated, is the eldest son of Colin and Christian Hardie. Nicholas was educated at Magdalen College School and Balliol College, Oxford. After taking his BA in 1970, he took an MBA from Lancaster University.

64 Victor Drew ran the little barber’s shop now called High St Barbers at 38 High Street, Oxford.

65 John 16:22: ‘Ye now therefore have sorrow: but I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice, and your joy no man taketh from you.’

66 George Herbert, The Temple (1633), ‘The Tempter’, I, 3-4: ‘If what my soul doth feel sometimes,/My soul might ever feel!’

67 See the biography of Robert William Chapman in CL II, p. 203n.

68 Legend relates that Stesichorus (c. 640-c. 555 BC), a Greek lyrical poet, was struck blind for having censured Helen in one of his poems. His sight was restored after he had written his Palinodia or recantation, in which he claims that it was not Helen, but her phantom, that accompanied Paris to Troy. This version of events was adopted by Euripides who used it in his play, Helen. Lewis was later to use this theme in his unfinished ‘After Ten Years’, published in The Dark Tower and Other Stories, ed. Walter Hooper (London: Collins, 1977; Fount, 1983).

69 Horace, Odes, I, ix, 21-4: ‘nunc et latentis proditor intimo/gratus puellae risus ab angulo/pignusque dereptum lacertis/aut digito male pertinaci’: ‘Now too the lovely laugh betraying the girl hiding in the secret corner, and the token snatched from her arm or her scarcely resisting finger.’

70 Chad Walsh, C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics (1949).

71 i.e., Warnie’s drinking.

72 Sister Madeleva CSC was a teacher of English at St Mary’s College, Notre Dame, Indiana, who had attended some of Lewis’s lectures in 1934. See her biography in CL II, p. 140n.

73 Sister Madeleva, A Lost Language (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1951), p. 17: ‘This practice of prayer was something of a habit with Chaucer…It was, of course, one of the writer’s conventions of his day. Had it not been, there is a probability that he would have practiced it. But, as a convention, the devotional sincerity of his prayers is frequently questioned. Conventions are a badly libelled lot. One knows they are devices; one concludes that they are deceits with an immediacy to be recommended rather for speed than for logic. Particularly is this true of the conventional medieval writing. Without going into digression on this matter, it may be volunteered that the fourteenth century writer probably used the convention to say what he meant rather than to say the exact opposite of what he meant.’

74 Mrs Lisbeth Greeves (1897-1982), née Lizzie Snowden Demaine, was the wife of Arthur’s cousin, Lt.-Col. John Ronald Howard Greeves (1900-). She was a devout and enthusiastic member of the Bahai faith, and was keen to discuss it with Lewis through the post.

75 One of Greeves’s dogs.

76 ‘No ham yet.’ See the letter to Greeves of 23 April 1951.

77 Cardinal Henri de Lubac (1896-1991), French lesuit theologian, was a professor of theology at Lyon for many years. He was one of the thinkers who created the intellectual climate of the Second Vatican Council (1962-5), his major contribution being to open up the vast spiritual resources of the Catholic tradition. De Lubac was one of the founders of the collection ‘Sources Chrétiennes’, an important series of patristic and medieval texts. Griffiths probably sent Lewis a copy of de Lubac’s Catholicism: A Study of Dogma in Relation to the Corporate Destiny of Mankind (London: Burns & Oates, 1950).

78 William Wordsworth, The Prelude: or, Growth of a Poet’s Mind (1850).

79 Matthew 5:29: ‘If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.’ See also Mark 9:47.

80 Lewis had already devoted an essay to this principle entitled ‘First and Second Things’, published in First and Second Things and EC.

81 The Festival of Britain.

82 See Colin and Christian Hardie in the Biographical Appendix.

83 Hardie had asked Lewis to read an essay he had written on ‘The Myth of Paris’. It has never been published.

84 ‘delete’.

85 Maurice Roy Ridley (1890-1969) was Tutor in English Literature at Balliol College, Oxford, 1920-45. See his biography in CL II, p. 306n.

86 Reginald Walter Macan (1848-1941) was Master of University College, Oxford, 1906-23. See his biography in CL I, p. 263n.

87 This letter was published in Essays in Criticism, I (July 1951), p. 313, under the title ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’.

88 Ian Watt, ‘Robinson Crusoe as a Myth’, Essays in Criticism, I (April 1951), pp. 95-119.

89 Watt’s reply appears on the same page as Lewis’s letter.

90 See Valerie Pitt in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1059-60. Pitt, who was writing a B. Litt. thesis for St Hugh’s College, Oxford, was secretary of the Socratic Club.

91 Austin Farrer was a member of the Socratic Club. See Austin and Katharine Farrer in the Biographical Appendix.

92 John Flavell (baptized 1630, d. 1691), Presbyterian minister and religious writer, was educated at University College, Oxford. He was the minister at Dartmouth, Devon, 1656-62. Following Charles II’s declaration of indulgence in 1672, Flavell returned to Dartmouth, licensed as a Congregationalist minister. His works include A Token for Mourners (1674), The Seaman’s Companion (1676), Divine Conduct (1678), Sea Deliverances (c. 1679), The Touchstone of Sincerity (1679), The Method of Grace (1681), A Saint Indeed (1684) and Treatise on the Soul of Man (1685). See the article on Flavell in the Oxford DNB.

93 E. R. Eddison, The Worm Ouroboros (1922). See Eric R”ucker Eddison in the Biographical Appendix to CL II, pp. 1025-8. Hamilton had been a close friend of Eddison, and he was trying to arrange for The Worm Ouroboros to be reprinted, with an introduction by Lewis. He was not successful.

94 James Stephens (1882-1950) wrote an introduction to Eddison’s A Fish Dinner in Memison (1941). See CL II, p. 558, n. 53.

95 ‘The other Eddison’ was Colin Eddison, brother of E. R. Eddison.

96 See the letter to Andrew Young of 18 May 1951.

97 See the Rev. Andrew John Young in the Biographical Appendix.

98 Andrew Young, Collected Poems (1936), ‘The Slow Race’, IV, 2.

99 George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons, 1st series (1867), ‘Love thy Neighbour’, p. 202: ‘No one loves because he sees why, but because he loves.’

100 This was probably Edward John Gough, author of Simple Thoughts on the Holy Eucharist (1893).

101 An article entitled ‘The Id and the Fall’ which was not, finally, published in The Month.

102 St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Part I, Question 98: ‘In the state of innocence there would have been generation of offspring for the multiplication of the human race; otherwise man’s sin would have been very necessary, for such a great blessing to be its result.’

103 ‘increase and multiply’.

104 Genesis 1:21-2: ‘And God created great whales, and every living creature…And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth.’

105 Starr had been teaching at Rollins College Winter Park, Florida, since 1941. In March 1951, its 33-year-old president, Paul Wagner, announced that almost a third of its laculty members (one of whom was Starr) were to be dismissed for ‘financial reasons’. Members of the board suspected that the progressive educator had fired these members because they refused to conform to his campaign for visual education, as opposed to the old reading and lecture method: Wagner boasted that after a number of years people wouldn’t know how to read. The firing was reported in ‘Squeeze at Rollins’, Life, 30, no. 13 (26 March 1951), p. 115. After months of wrangling, the faculty members were reinstated and Wagner was removed from office. He was replaced by Hugh F. McKean (1908-95), a member of the art faculty. Professor Starr chose to resign at the end of the academic year 1951-2, and he spent the next academic year at Kansai University, Osaka, Japan as a Fulbright Scholar. See the letter to Starr of 3 February 1953.

106 George MacDonald, The Diary of an Old Soul (1885).

107 Virgil, Georgia, IV, 169; Aeneid, I, 436: ‘the work grows leverish’.

108 John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress from this World to That which is to Come, ed. lames Blanton Wharey, 2nd edn rev. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960), First Part, p. 106: ‘Then Christian and Hopeful outwent them again, and went till they came at a delicate Plain, called Ease, where they went with much content.’

109 Springfield St Mary’s was a youth hostel at 122 Banbury Road, Oxford, run by the Community of St Mary the Virgin.

110 Lewis was reading Skinner’s The Return of Arthur: Merlin (London: Frederick Muller, 1951), the first part of a four-part work. The second part was entitled The Return of Arthur: Parti (London: Chapman and Hall, 1955); the third was entitled The Return of Arthur: Part II (London: Chapman and Hall, 1959). The complete edition, containing the three earlier volumes as well as The Return of Arthur, Part III, was published under the title The Return of Arthur: A Poem of the Future (London: Chapman and Hall, 1966). Because of the rarity of the individual parts, all references are to the 1966 edition.

111 ‘to think alike about political affairs’. From Henry St John Bolingbroke (1678-1751), Dissertation Upon Parties, Letter 1.

112 Skinner, The Return of Arthur: Merlin, II, ii, 5.

113 ibid., xxxvii.

114 Stanza.

115 ibid., Ill, ix. ‘Lasciate etc’ refers to Dante, Inferno, III, 9.

116 Sir Desmond MacCarthy (1877-1952), literary journalist, was known for his theatre criticism and for his reviews and other writing in the Sunday Times.

117 In C. S. Lewis: Apostle to the Skeptics, ch. 20, p. 161, Walsh stated: ‘I mention what Lewis has not done, not as a reproach to him, but to suggest to his overardent admirers that an exclusive diet of his works is not wholesome.’

118 Genia Goelz—Mrs E. L. Goelz—was the daughter of Mrs Mary Van Deusen. She is referred to as ‘Mrs Sonia Graham’ in L. She was writing from 2756 Reese Avenue, Evanston, Illinois. Although abbreviated copies of the letters to Mrs Goelz appeared in L, complete copies were made by Walter Hooper in 1965.

119 Mary Elizabeth ‘Lily Ewart was Greeves’s sister. See her biography in CL I, p. 98n.

120 Dr Firor had a ranch in Wyoming, and he was constantly urging Lewis to join him there.

121 In The Great Divorce: A Dream (London: Bles, 1945 [1946]; Fount, 1997), ch. 11, one of the Ghosts has on his shoulder a Red Lizard who represents Lust.

122 Robert C. Walton, head of the BBC’s School Broadcasting Department, wrote to Lewis on 9 July 1951 announcing plans for six half-hour programmes on ‘the nature of evidence’: ‘We shall begin by stating as clearly as possible the Christian belief that God is to be understood in personal terms, and then two speakers will discuss with the “interrogator” how they have come to accept the Christian conception of God’s nature. Our main purpose is not to argue whether or not the Christian belief is true, but to explain the nature of the evidence which leads Christians to this conclusion. We should be very glad if you would take part in this programme.’

123 The old white cobra in ‘The King’s Ankus’ in Kipling’s Second Jungle Book (1895).

124 Sir David Lyndsay, The Monarchie (Ane Dialog Betwix Experience and ane Courteour) (1554), 1293-4.

125 This letter was first published in the Church Times, CXXXIV (10 August 1951), p. 541, under the title ‘The Holy Name’.

126 Leslie E. T. Bradbury, ‘The Holy Name’, Church Times, CXXXIV (3 August 1951), p. 525.

127 See the biography of Idrisyn Oliver Evans in CL II, p. 584n.

128 I. O. Evans, The Coming of a King: A Story of the Stone Age (1950).

129 Mrs Vulliamy was writing from Park College, Parksville, Missouri.

130 Lewis’s doctor, Robert Emlyn ‘Humphrey Havard.

131 Acts 9:4-5: ‘And he fell to the earth, and heard a voice saying unto him, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? And he said, Who are thou, Lord? And the Lord said, I am Jesus whom thou persecutes’

132 Colossians 1:23-4: ‘I Paul…now rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up that which is behind of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh for his body’s sake, which is the church.’

133 Romans 12:5: ‘So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.’

134 Lewis was referring to a problem that sometimes arises when, in a family of non-Christians, one of them becomes a Christian. It is one of the themes in Lewis’s novel, Till We Have Faces. See the letter to Clyde Kilby of 10 February 1957.

135 Lewis meant ‘The Coming of Galahad’ in Charles Williams’s Taliessin Through Logres (1938).

136 Luke 12:49-53: Suppose ye that I am come to give peace on earth? I tell you, Nay; but rather division: For from henceforth there shall be five in one house divided, three against two, and two against three. The father shall be divided against the son, and the son against the father; the mother against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother; the mother in law against her daughter in law, and the daughter in law against her mother in law.’

* Yet oh! How I sympathise with him! God is such an Intruder! We must deal with them v. tenderly.

137 Francis of Assist: Early Documents, 3 vols., ed. Regis J. Armstrong OFM Cap., J. A. Wayne Hellmann OFM, Conv., William J. Short OFM (New York: New City Press, 2000), Vol. II: The Founder, ‘The Legends and Sermons about Saint Francis by Bonaventure of Bagnoregio (1255-1267)’, p. 564: ‘[Francis of Assisi] taught his brothers…that they should master their rebellious and lazy flesh by constant discipline and useful work. Therefore he used to call his body Brother Ass, for he felt it should be subjected to heavy labor, beaten frequently with whips, and fed with the poorest food.’

138 This was the Italian translation of Out of the Silent Planet, published as Lontano dal Pianeta Silenzioso, trans. Franca Degli Espinosa (Milan and Verona: Mandadori, 1951).

139 See the biography of Bernard Acworth in CL II, p. 632n. Acworth was founder and president emeritus of the Evolution Protest Movement.

140 Bernard Acworth, This Progress: The Tragedy of Evolution (London: Rich & Cowan, 1934).

141 The tomb of Boethius (AD 480-524) is in the Church of S. Pietro Ciel d’Oro at Pavia.

142 The edition Lewis used was The Consolation of Philosophy, with the English Translation of ‘I.T.’ (1609), rev. H. E Stewart (London: Heinemann, Loeb Classical Library, 1918).

143 Kinter had asked about a sentence in the preface of Lewis’s That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-Ups (London: John Lane, 1945; HarperCollins, 2000), p. xii: ‘Those who would like to learn further about Numinor and the True West must (alas!) await the publication of much that still exists only in the MSS. of my friend, Professor J. R. R. Tolkien.’

144 Max M”uller, The Science of Language, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, 1891), Vol. II, p. 454.

145 George MacDonald, Sir Gibbie (1879), ch. 47: ‘the time for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never departs.’

146 Wendell W. Watters, MD, a Canadian psychiatrist, was Professor of Psychiatry at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. He was the author of Deadly Doctrine: Health, Illness, and Christian God-talk (1992).

147 This letter first appeared in L as ‘To A CRITICAL BUT CHARITABLE READER’, and was incorrectly dated 12 September 1951.

148 Dr Watters’s objection to Christ’s ‘unfair advantage’ was occasioned by Lewis’s Broadcast Talks, Bk. II, ch. 4. When revising the talks for Mere Christianity (London: Bles, 1952; HarperCollins, 2002), Lewis added two paragraphs to the end of Book II, Chapter 4, in which he used the example given here: ‘I have heard some people complain that if lesus was God as well as man, then His sufferings and death lose all value in their eyes, “because it must have been so easy for him”…If I am drowning in a rapid river, a man who still has one foot on the bank may give me a hand which saves my life. Ought I to shout back (between my gasps) “No, it’s not fair! You have an advantage! You’re keeping one foot on the bank”? That advantage—call it “unfair” if you like—is the only reason why he can be of any use to me. To what will you look for help if you will not look to that which is stronger than yourself?’ (pp. 58-9)

149 Geoffrey Bles was pressing Blamires to persuade Lewis to write a preface for Blamires’s English in Education (London: Bles, 1951).

150 i.e., the preface he was writing for D. E. Harding’s The Hierarchy of Heaven and Earth.

151 See the biography of Herbert Palmer, poet and literary critic, in CL II, p. 678n.

152 John Milton, Prose Works, with preliminary remarks and notes by J. A. St John, 5 vols. (London: Bohn’s Standard Library, 1948-53).

153 Herbert Palmer, ‘English Poetry: 1938-1950–I’, The Fortnightly, CLXX (September 1951), pp. 624-8; ‘English Poetry: 1938-1950–II’, ibid. (October 1951), pp. 695-700; ‘English Poetry: 1938-1950–III’, ibid. (October 1951), pp. 768-74.

155 i.e., The Problem of Pain.

156 Ashley Sampson of Geoffrey Bles, The Centenary Press, had asked Lewis to contribute a book on pain to the Christian Challenge series. See CL II, p. 289n.

157 The Problem of Pain, ch. 1, p. 15: ‘The Christian faith…has the master touch–the rough, male taste of reality’

158 ‘C. S. Lewis: 1898-1963’, Bodleian Library, MS. Facs. d. 290.

159 Since the thirteenth century there have been many versions of the legend of the Wandering Jew. In essence the legend recounts how a Jew chided Christ as he bore the cross to Calvary and was thereafter condemned to wander about the world until Christ’s Second Coming.

160 Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, Part I, pp. 55-6.

161 United Nations Organization.

162 25 April.

163 Hebrews 11:1: ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.’

164 Psalm 8:2; Matthew 21:16.

165 Numbers 22:24-31.

166 Philippians 4:4.

167 Colossians 2:14-5.