id="ucdb3b9aa-6d7d-5551-abe1-b22a4d89dff5">
William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
1
Copyright © 1967 by C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd.
Copyright renewed 1973 C. S. Lewis Pte Ltd
This ebook first published by William Collins in 2017
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN 9780008203856
Ebook Edition © December 2016 ISBN: 9780008228552 Version: 2016-12-15
CONTENTS
Religion: Reality or Substitute?
Petitionary Prayer: A Problem Without an Answer
We were talking one day in 1963, C. S. Lewis and I, about the ‘resurrection’ of literary works. He mentioned Sir Walter Scott as one of his favourite authors whose books had gone out of fashion, but which appeared to be undergoing just such a resurrection. When I predicted that his own books would suffer no decline, he cautioned me against putting too high a value on them. Indeed, he tried to modulate my enthusiasm by pointing out that after an author’s death the general ‘rule’ is that the sales of his books fall drastically and eventually dry up altogether. ‘But sometimes – not by any means always –’, he said, ‘an author’s works undergo a kind of “resurrection”. But that is something no author, alive or dead, can count on.’
A literary historian, Lewis was naturally familiar with this phenomenon. He cherished no undue optimism as to what would happen to his books, and thus his frequent but gentle admonitions when I praised them more than he felt they deserved, and certainly more than made him comfortable. The truth is that Lewis was almost without opinions regarding the value of his writings. In so far as he was ‘worried’ about their future, it was simply that if the sales of his books stopped, and he died first, his elder brother Warren might find it difficult to survive.
A man of such remarkable astuteness, it must seem to many a wonder that C. S. Lewis could have been so unprophetic about the enduring success of his own books – such a glaring exception to the ‘rule’ he spoke of. But those familiar with his life will recall that Lewis was always more interested in writing and arguing for truth, whatever his subject, than in what he might become as a result of it. In this sense, he perfectly fulfilled what, in his essay on ‘Christianity and Literature’, he believed to be the proper attitude of a Christian author towards his own works: ‘Of every idea and of every method he will ask not “Is it mine?” but “Is it good?”’
While he seemed oblivious to the good he had himself given the world, he was by no means oblivious of the harm which has resulted from the widespread apostasy of the clergy, the cant and slush talked by the liberalizing ‘intelligentsia’ and the general lunacy of the world. Lewis certainly knew his place in all this, seeing himself as a Christian layman committed to explaining and defending what he called that ‘enormous common ground’ of belief which, by God’s mercy, exists at the centre of most Christian communions.
Talking about the spiritual bankruptcy we saw around us, Lewis said to me, ‘Our civilization was built upon Christian morals and nourished by the Faith of the Apostles. It was rather like a huge bank account to which many contributed and which everyone has drawn upon. Now, we know that you cannot go on writing cheques on an account unless you continue to add to its capital. The trouble is that, without adding to that capital, we continue to write cheques. One day that capital will run out.’ An apt analogy, it was nevertheless an unusual one coming
