Letter #2

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

I note with grave displeasure that your patient has become a Christian. Do not begin to hope that you will escape the usual punishments; indeed, in your better moments, I trust you would hardly even wish to do so. In the meantime we must make the best of the situation.

There is no need to despair; hundreds of these adult converts have been reclaimed after a brief sojourn in the Enemy's camp and are now with us. All the habits of the patient, both mental and bodily, are still in our favor.

One of our great allies right now is the church itself. Do not misunderstand me. I do not mean the Church as we see her spread but through all time and space and rooted in eternity, terrible as an army with banners. That, I confess, is a spectacle which makes I our boldest tempters quiver. But fortunately THAT Church is quite invisible to these humans. All your patient sees is the poorly constructed multipurpose building built on the edge of town. When he goes inside, he sees the local grocer with a rather oily expression on his face bustling up to offer him a shabby little book containing old texts of a number of religious lyrics, mostly bad, and in very small print.

When he gets to his seat and looks round him he sees just that selection of his neighbours whom he normally prefers to avoid. You want to lean pretty heavily on those neighbours. Make his mind flit to and fro between an expression like "the body of Christ" and the actual faces in the next row. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next row really contains. You may know one of them to be a great warrior on the Enemy's side. No matter. Your patient, thanks to Our Father below, is a fool. Provided that any of those neighbors sing out of tune, or smell funny, or have double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite easily believe that their religion is most likely ridiculous. At his present stage, you see, he has an idea of "Christians" in his mind which he supposes to be spiritual but which, in fact, is largely an image. His mind is full of expensive clothes and good hair and great teeth and an impressive physique and the mere fact that the other people in church wear normal clothes is a real—though of course an unconscious—difficulty to him. Never let it come to the surface; never let him ask what he expected them to look like. Keep everything hazy in his mind now, and you will have all eternity to amuse yourself by producing in him the peculiar kind of clarity which Hell affords.

Work hard, then, on the disappointment or anticlimax which is certainly coming to the patient during his first few weeks as a churchgoer. The Enemy allows this disappointment to occur on the threshold of every human endeavour. It occurs when the boy who has been enchanted in the nursery by stories of Ninja Warriors buckles down to really learning Martial Arts. It occurs when lovers get married and begin the real task of learning to live together. In every department of life it marks the transition from dreaming aspiration to laborious doing. The Enemy takes this risk because He has a curious fantasy of making all these disgusting little human vermin into what He calls His "free" lovers and servants—"sons" is the word He uses, with His obsessive love of degrading the whole spiritual world by unnatural relationships with these two-legged animals. Desiring their freedom, He therefore refuses to carry them, by their mere affections and habits, to any of the goals which He sets before them: He leaves them to "do it on their own". And there lies our opportunity. But also, remember, there lies our danger. If once they get through this initial dryness successfully, they become much less dependent on emotion and therefore much harder to tempt.

I have been writing up to now on the assumption that the people in the next row afford no actual ground for disappointment. Of course if they do—if the patient knows that the woman with the absurd hat is addicted to playing the lottery or the man with the greasy hair is a cheapskate and a money grubber—then your task is so much the easier. All you then have to do is to keep out of his mind the question "If I, being as bad a sinner as I know myself to be, can be considered a Christian, why should the different vices of those people in the next row prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and play acting?" You may ask whether it is possible to keep such an obvious thought from occurring even to a human mind. It is, Wormwood, it is! Handle him properly and it simply won't come into his head. He has nowhere near long enough with the Enemy to have any real humility yet. What he says, even on his knees, about his own sinfulness is all parrot talk. At bottom, he still believes he has run up a very favourable credit-balance in the Enemy's ledger by allowing himself to be converted, and thinks that he is showing great humility and condescension in going to church with these "smug", commonplace neighbours at all. Keep him in that state of mind as long as you can.

Your affectionate uncle SCREWTAPE