Screwtape offers more techniques for confusing the Patient:
I have been writing hitherto on the assumption //that [the people in the next pew] afford no rational ground for disappointment.
Of course if they do—if the patient knows that [the woman with the absurd hat] is a fanatical bridge-player or the man with squeaky boots a miser and an extortioner—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 what I am, can consider that I am in some sense a Christian,
why should [the different vices of those people in the next pew] prove that their religion is mere hypocrisy and convention?’
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 not been anything like 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.
From The Screwtape Letters
Compiled in A Year with C.S. Lewis