So let me explain. This is a short collection of quotes from various letters from C.S. Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters." For you dedicated readers, you may recall that I made a post about The Screwtape Letters back in the first year of this book blog's existence. What is great is that I was not able to provide all the quotes that I wanted to because there are just too many. Now I can provide some more that I was not able to then. And I'll still have to leave some out because there will still be a lot for this post.
Anyway, I got this little book (just under 100 pages) in my stocking Christmas morning one year. You're the best, Santa. So I read it over the course of a few trips back and forth on the bus while I commuted to school from Draper to Orem.
Let us get to the quotes already. Reminder: The book was written from the perspective of a senior devil giving advice to a junior devil of how to tempt us and lead us astray. If there is a reference to "the Enemy," it is a reference to God (who is the enemy of the devils, duh).
Quotes:
"It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick."
"If the thing he prays for doesn't happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don't work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and 'therefore it would have happened anyway', and thus a granted prayer becomes just as good a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective."
"The fact that 'devils' are predominantly comic figures in the modern imagination will help you. If any faint suspicion of your existence begins to arise in his mind, suggest to him a picture of something in red tights, and persuade him that since he cannot believe in that (it is an old textbook method of confusing them) he therefore cannot believe in you."
"One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself....We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally become sons."
"All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which He has forbidden."
"Obviously you are making excellent progress. My only fear is lest in attempting to hurry the patient you awaken him to a sense of his real position. For you and I, who see that position as it really is, must never forget how totally different it ought to appear to him. We know that we have introduced a change of direction in his course which is already carrying him out of his orbit around the Enemy; but he must be made to imagine that all the choices which have effected this change of course are trivial and revocable. He must not be allowed to suspect that he is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space.
For this reason I am almost glad to hear that he is still a churchgoer and a communicant. I know there are dangers in this; but anything is better than that he should realise the break he has made with the first months of his Christian life. As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn't been doing very well lately."
"All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them."
"Thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools....They cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible."
Amazing stuff.
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