Forgiveness by its nature is for the unworthy.

[soso]

7 July 1959

. . . You seem to have had a very nasty experience. 

I can see why you describe it as ‘looking into the face of death’:

 but who knows whether that face, when we really look at it, will be at all like that? 

Let us hope better things. 

I had [a tooth] out /the other day,

and came away /wondering whether we dare hope that the moment of death may be very like that delicious moment

/when one realises that the tooth is really out and a voice says ‘Rinse [your mouth] out /with this.’

 ‘This’ of course will be Purgatory. . .

You surely don’t mean ‘feeling that we are not worthy to be forgiven’? For of course we aren’t. 

Forgiveness by its nature is for the unworthy. 

You mean ‘Feeling //that we are not forgiven.’ I have known that. 

I ‘believed’ theoretically in the divine forgiveness for years /before it really came home to me.

It is a wonderful moment /when it does.

From The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume III
Compiled in Yours, Jack