Imprimer le Fil Complet
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 pew. It matters very little, of course, what kind of people that next pew 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 neighbours sing out of tune, or
have boots that squeak, or double chins, or odd clothes, the patient will quite
easily believe that their religion must therefore be somehow 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 pictorial. His mind is
full of togas and sandals and armour and bare legs and the mere fact that the
other people in church wear modern 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 wherein 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 churchman. 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 from the Odyssey
buckles down to really learning Greek. It occurs when lovers have got 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 inveterate love of degrading the
whole spiritual world by unnatural liaisons with the 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.