Today's Reading
Screwtape expands /on developing church participation for evil ends:
Surely
you know that if a man can’t be cured of churchgoing, the next best
thing is to send him all over the neighbourhood /looking for the church
//that ‘suits’ him /until he becomes a taster or connoisseur of churches.
The
reasons are obvious.
In the first place the parochial organisation
should always be attacked,
because, being a unity of place and not of
likings, it brings people of different classes and psychology together
/in the kind of unity () the Enemy desires.
The congregational principle, on
the other hand, makes each church into a kind of club,
and finally, if
all goes well, into a coterie or faction.
In the second place, the
search for a ‘suitable’ church makes the man a critic //where the Enemy
wants him to be a pupil.
[What He wants of the layman in church] is an
attitude //which may, indeed, be critical /in the sense of rejecting what
is false or unhelpful, but which is wholly uncritical /in the sense //that
it does not appraise
—does not waste time /in thinking about what it
rejects, but lays itself open in uncommenting, humble receptivity /to any
nourishment //that is going.
* Definition of appraise - assess the value or quality of.
(You see how grovelling, how unspiritual,
how irredeemably vulgar He is!)
This attitude, especially during
sermons, creates the condition (most hostile to our whole policy)
//in
which platitudes can become really audible /to a human soul.
* Definition of audible - able to be heard
There is
hardly any sermon, or any book, which may not be dangerous to us if it
is received in this temper.
* platitude definition: 1. a remark or statement
that may be true but is boring and has no meaning
because it has been
said so many times before: 진부함
* Temper definition, a particular state of mind or feelings.
From The Screwtape Letters
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis
The Screwtape Letters.
Copyright © 1942, C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. Copyright restored © 1996 C. S.
Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of
HarperCollins Publishers. A Year With C.S. Lewis: Daily Readings from His Classic Works. Copyright © 2003 by C. S. Lewis Pte. Ltd. All rights reserved. Used with permission of HarperCollins Publishers.