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XIV

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

Thein your last account of the patient is that he isnone of those confident resolutions which inal conversion No ather; not even the expectation of an endowrace" for life, but only a hope for the daily and hourly pittance to meet the daily and hourly te to do at the moment Your patient has become humble; have you drawn his attention to the fact? All virtues are less formidable to us once the man is aware that he has them, but this is specially true of humility Catch hile into hishumble", and almost immediately pride - pride at his own huer and tries to smother this new forh as , for fear you awake his sense of huh at you and go to bed

But there are other profitable ways of fixing his attention on the virtue of Humility By this virtue, as by all the others, our Enemy wants to turn the man’s attention away frohbours All the abjection and self-hatred are designed, in the long run, solely for this end; unless they attain this end they do us little harood if they keep the man concerned with himself, and, above all, if self-conte-point for conteloom, cynicism, and cruelty

You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Huetfulness but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character Soather, he really has Fix in histo believe those talents to be less valuable than he believes them to be No doubt they are in fact less valuable than he believes, but that is not the point The great thing is to make him value an opinion for so an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue By this ht to think that huly and cleverto believe they are fools And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, beit and we have the chance of keeping theiron themselves in an effort to achieve the iy, wethe n the best cathedral in the world, and know it to be the best, and rejoice in the, fact, without being anydone it than he would be if it had been done by another The Enemy wants him, in the end, to be so free from any bias in his own favour that he can rejoice in his own talents as frankly and gratefully as in his neighbour’s talents - or in a sunrise, an elephant, or a waterfall He wants each nise all creatures (even his He wants to kill their ani-term policy, I fear, to restore to theratitude for all selves, including their ohen they have really learned to love their neighbours as thehbours For we et what is the most repellent and inexplicable trait in our Enemy; He really loves the hairless bipeds He has created and always gives back to theht hand what He has taken aith His left

His whole effort, therefore, will be to get the ether He would rather the reat poet and then forgot about it, than that he should spendto think hilory or false modesty into the patient will therefore be met from the Enemy’s side with the obvious reminder that a man is not usually called upon to have an opinion of his own talents at all, since he can very well go on i on his own precise niche in the temple of Fame You must try to exclude this reminder from the patient’s consciousness at all costs The Enemy will also try to render real in the patient’s mind a doctrine which they all profess but find it difficult to bring hos - the doctrine that they did not create theht as well be proud of the colour of their hair But always and by all et the patient’s mind off such questions, and yours will be to fix it on them Even of his sins the Enemy does not want him to think too much: once they are repented, the sooner the man turns his attention outward, the better the Enemy is pleased, Your affectionate uncle

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