Today's Reading
Screwtape shows Wormwood how to transform a minor trespass into a major sin:
Success
here depends on confusing him.
If you try to make him explicitly and
professedly proud of being a Christian,
you will probably fail; the
Enemy’s warnings are too well known.
If, on the other hand, you let [the
idea of ‘we Christians’] [drop out altogether]
and merely make him
complacent about ‘his set’,
you will produce not true spiritual pride
but mere social vanity which, by comparison, is a trumpery, puny little
sin.
* complacent. 1 : marked by self-satisfaction especially when accompanied by unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies :
[What you want] is to keep a sly self-congratulation /mixing with all
his thoughts and never allow him to raise the question ‘What, precisely,
am I congratulating myself about?’
* 동격관계; the question = ‘What, precisely,
am I congratulating myself about?
[The idea of belonging to an inner
ring], of being in a secret, is very sweet to him.
Play on that nerve.
* play on; To exploit or take advantage of some belief, attitude, or trend.
Teach him, using the influence of this girl /when she is silliest,
to
adopt an air of amusement at the things () the unbelievers say.
[Some
theories //which he may meet in modern Christian circles] may here prove
helpful;
theories, I mean, that place [the hope of society] /in some inner
ring of ‘clerks’,
some trained minority of theocrats.
* theocrat - an advocate of a system of government in which priests rule in the name of God or a god.
It is no affair of
yours [whether those theories are true or false];
the great thing is to
make Christianity a mystery religion //in which he feels himself one of
the initiates.
* It = [whether those theories are true or false]
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.