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IX

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

I hope h of dulness or "dryness" through which your patient is going at present will not, of itself, give you his soul, but needs to be properly exploited What forms the exploitation should take I will now consider

In the first place I have always found that the Trough periods of the human undulation provide excellent opportunity for all sensual temptations, particularly those of sex This may surprise you, because, of course, there is y, and therefore more potential appetite, at the Peak periods; but you must remehest The health and spirits which you want to use in producing lust can also, alas, be very easily used for work or play or thought or innocuous merriment The attack has a much better chance of success when the man’s whole inner world is drab and cold and eh sexuality is subtly different in quality from that of the Peak - much less likely to lead to thein love", much more easily drawn into perversions, inative and even spiritual conco It is the same with other desires of the flesh You aredrink on hi hi his friends when he is happy and expansive Never forget that e are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and nor forround I knoe have won h pleasure All the same, it is His invention, not ours He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our Enerees, which He has forbidden Hence ays try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable An ever increasing craving for an ever di pleasure is the foret thein return - that is what really gladdens our Father’s heart And the troughs are the ti the process

But there is an even better way of exploiting the Trough; I hts about it As always, the first step is to keep knowledge out of his mind Do not let him suspect the law of undulation Let hiht have been expected to last, and ought to have lasted, forever, and that his present dryness is an equally perot this misconception well fixed in his head, you may then proceed in various ways It all depends on whether yourtype who can be te type who can be assured that all is well The for the hu to it, everything is easy You have only got to keep him out of the way of experienced Christians (an easy task now-a-days), to direct his attention to the appropriate passages in scripture, and then to set hi his old feelings by sheer will-power, and the game is ours If he is of the more hopeful type, your job is to make hiradually beco himself that it is not so low after all In a week or two you will behim doubt whether the first days of his Christianity were not, perhaps, a little excessive Talk to hiet hiion is all very well up to a point", you can feel quite happy about his soul A ion at all - and

Another possibility is that of direct attack on his faith When you have caused hih is perious phase" is just going to die away like all his previous phases? Of course there is no conceivable way of getting by reason fro interest in this" to the proposition "This is false" But, as I said before, it is jargon, not reason, you must rely on The mere word phase will very likely do the trick I assuh several of them before - they all have - and that he always feels superior and patronising to the ones he has eed from, not because he has really criticised them but simply because they are in the past (You keep hiress and Developive hiraphies to read? The people in the from Phases, aren’t they?)

You see the idea? Keep his mind off the plain antithesis between True and False Nice shadowy expressions - "It was a phase" - "I’ve been through all that" - and don’t forget the blessed word "Adolescent",

Your affectionate uncle

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