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VIII

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

So you "have great hopes that the patient’s religious phase is dying away", have you? I always thought the Training College had gone to pieces since they put old Slubgob at the head of it, and now I am sure Has no one ever told you about the law of Undulation?

Humans are amphibians - half spirit and half animal (The Ene hybrid was one of the things that determined Our Father to withdraw his support fro to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and ie, for to be in tie Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation - the repeated return to a level frohs and peaks If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life - his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of nuh which your patient is now going are not, as you fondly suppose, your workmanship; they are ood unless you ood use of it

To decide what the best use of it is, you must ask what use the Enemy wants to make of it, and then do the opposite Now it et perhs even one through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else The reason is this To us a huood; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense But the obedience which the Ene One must face the fact that all the talk about His love forperfect freedoanda, but an appalling truth He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself - creatures, whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His We want cattle who can finally become food; He wants servants who can finally becoive out We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into his united to Hihs come in You must have often wondered why the Enemy does not make more use of His power to be sensibly present to huree He chooses and at any moment But you now see that the Irresistible and the Indisputable are the teapons which the very nature of His scheme forbids Him to use Merely to over-ride a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and ree would certainly do) would be for Hinoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate the at the beginning He will set theh faint, seereat to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation But He never allows this state of affairs to last long Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs - to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish It is during such trough periods,into the sort of creature He wants it to be Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Hi, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better He cannot "tempt" to virtue as we do to vice He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles Do not be deceived, Worer, than when a hu, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys

But of course the troughs afford opportunities to our side also Next week I will give you some hints on how to exploit them,

Your affectionate uncle

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