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VI

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

I ae and profession make it possible, but by no means certain, that he will be called up for military service We want him to be in the maximum uncertainty, so that his mind will be filled with contradictory pictures of the future, every one of which arouses hope or fear There is nothing like suspense and anxiety for barricading a huainst the Enemy He wants men to be concerned hat they do; our business is to keep the about ill happen to them

Your patient will, of course, have picked up the notion that he must submit with patience to the Enemy’s will What the Enemy means by this is primarily that he should accept with patience the tribulation which has actually been dealt out to him - the present anxiety and suspense It is about this that he is to say "Thy will be done", and for the daily task of bearing this that the daily bread will be provided It is your business to see that the patient never thinks of the present fear as his appointed cross but only of the things he is afraid of

Let hiet that, since they are incompatible, they cannot all happen to him, and let him try to practise fortitude and patience to thenation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is alreatly assist those who are trying to attain it: resignation to present and actual suffering, even where that suffering consists of fear, is far easier and is usually helped by this direct action

An important spiritual law is here involved I have explained that you can weaken his prayers by diverting his attention from the Enemy Himself to his own states of mind about the Enemy On the other hand fear becomes easier tofeared to the fear itself, considered as a present and undesirable state of his own ards the fear as his appointed cross he will inevitably think of it as a state of eneral rule; in all activities of e the patient to be un-selfconscious and to concentrate on the object, but in all activities favourable to the Enemy bend his mind back on itself Let an insult or a woman’s body so fix his attention outward that he does not reflect "I aer - or the state called Lust" Contrariwise let the reflection "My feelings are noing more devout, or er looks beyond hiards his eneral attitude to the war, you s of hatred which the hu in Christian, or anti-Christian, periodicals In his anguish, the patient can, of course, be encouraged to revenge his directed towards the Geroes But it is usually a sort of inary scapegoats He has never ures ets from newspapers The results of such fanciful hatred are often lish are in this respect the most deplorable milksops They are creatures of that ood for their enearettes to the first wounded German pilot who turns up at the back door Do what you will, there is going to be some benevolence, as well as so is to direct the hbours whom he meets every day and to thrust his benevolence out to the remote circumference, to people he does not know The ely i his hatred of Gerrowing up between him and his mother, his employer, and the man he meets in the train Think of yourthe inner next, and finally his fantasy You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude fro that s all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will It is only in so far as they reach the will and are there embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us (I don’t, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart) All sorts of virtues painted in the fantasy or approved by the intellect or even, in some measure, loved and admired, will not keep a man from our Father’s house: indeed they ets there,

Your affectionate uncle

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