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MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

I note what you say about guiding our patient’s reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of hisa trifle na&iuument was the way to keep hiht have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier At that ti was proved and when it was not; and if it was proved they really believed it They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning But ith the weekly press and other such weapons we have largely altered that Your man has been accustomed, ever since he was a boy, to have a dozen incoether inside his head He doesn’t think of doctrines as primarily "true" of "false", but as "academic" or "practical", "outworn" or "conteu hi to make hi, or stark, or courageous - that it is the philosophy of the future That’s the sort of thing he cares about

The trouble about argule onto the Eneue too; whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I areatly the inferior of Our Father Below By the very act of arguing, you awake the patient’s reason; and once it is awake, who can foresee the result? Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences Your business is to fix his attention on the stream Teach him to call it "real life" and don’t let him ask what he means by "real"

Re been a hue of the Enemy’s!) you don’t realise how enslaved they are to the pressure of the ordinary I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museuht in hisway The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment Before I knehere I was I sawto totter If I had lost ument I should have been undone But I was not such a fool I struck instantly at the part of the ested that it was just about time he had soestion (you kno one can never quite overhear What He says to them?) that this was more important than lunch At least I think that must have been His line for when I said "Quite In fact ", the patient brightened up considerably; and by the tio into it with a fresh mind", he was already half way to the door Once he was in the street the battle on I showed hi past, and before he reached the bottoot into hiht come into a man’s head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of "real life" (by which he h to show hi" just couldn’t be true He knew he’d had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about "that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultiic" He is now safe in Our Father’s house

You begin to see the point? Thanks to processes which we set at work in theo, they find it all but impossible to believe in the unfa hos Above all, do not atteainst Christianity They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can’t touch and see There have been sad cases a the modern physicists If he y; don’t let hiet away from that invaluable "real life" But the best of all is to let hieneral idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is "the results of ation" Do remember you are there to fuddle hi fiends talk, anyone would suppose it was our job to teach!

Your affectionate uncle

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