Audiobook
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EnglishVoice Age
Middle Aged (35-54)Accents
North American (General)Transcript
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my dear wormwood, I note what you say about guiding your patients, reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his materialist friend. But are you not being a trifle naive? It sounds as if you suppose that argument was the way to keep him out of the enemy's clutches. That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier. At that time, the humans still knew pretty well when the thing was proved and when it was not. And if it was proved they really believed it, they still connected. Thinking with doing and we're prepared to alter their way of life is the result of a chain of reasoning. But what would the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered? That your man has been accustomed ever since he was a boy, having a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head? He doesn't think of doctrines is primarily true or false. But as academic or practical, outworn or contemporary, conventional or ruthless jargon, not argument, is your best ally and keeping him from the church. Don't waste time in trying to make him think that materialism is true, make him think it is strong or stark or courageous that it is the philosophy of the future. That's the sort of thing he cares about. Remember, He is not like you, a pure spirit, never having been a human of that abominable advantage of the enemies. You don't realize how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary. I once had a patient, a sound atheist who used to read in the British Museum. One day is he's at reading. I saw a train of thought in his mind, beginning to go the wrong way. The enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment before I knew where I was. I saw my 20 years work beginning to taught her. If I had lost my head and begun to attempted defence by argument, I should have been undone. But I was not such a fool. I struck instantly at the part of the man, which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time. He had some lunch. The enemy presumably made the counter suggestion. You know how one could never quite over here what he says to them, that this was more important than lunch. At least I think that must have been his line for what I said, quite in fact, much too important to tackle. At the end of the morning, the patient brightened up considerably, and by the time I had added much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fresh mind. He was already halfway to the door. Once he was in the street, the battle was won. I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper and a number 73 bus going past. And before he reached the bottom of the steps, I had got into him an unalterable conviction that whatever on ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of riel life by which he meant the bus in the newsboy with enough to show him that all that sort of thing just couldn't be true. He knew he had had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about that inarticulate sense for actuality, which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic. He is now safe in our father's house. Do you remember? You were there to funnel him from the way some of your young fiends talk. Anyone would Suppose it was our job to teach your affectionate Uncle Screwtape?