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XXV

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

The real trouble about the set your patient is living in is that it is merely Christian They all have individual interests, of course, but the bond remains mere Christianity What ant, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call "Christianity And" You know - Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology, Christianity and the New Order, Christianity and Faith Healing, Christianity and Psychical Research, Christianity and Vegetarianis Reform If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference Substitute for the faith itself so Work on their horror of the Sa is one of the most valuable passions we have produced in the huion, folly in counsel, infidelity in e, and inconstancy in friendship The humans live in time, and experience reality successively To experience much of it, therefore, they s; in other words, they e, the Enee pleasurable to the Pleasurable But since He does not wish the, an end in itself, He has balanced the love of change in theratify both tastes together on the very world He has e and perives them the seasons, each season different yet every year the sa is always felt as a novelty yet always as the recurrence of an iives thee from a fast to a feast, but it is the saerate the pleasure of eating to produce gluttony, so we pick out this natural pleasantness of change and twist it into a demand for absolute novelty This delect our duty, men will be not only contented but transported by the mixed novelty and fa, pluht theaularly as autumn follows summer Only by our incessant efforts is the dee kept up

This demand is valuable in various ways In the first place it di desire The pleasure of novelty is by its very naturereturns And continued novelty costs money, so that the desire for it spells avarice or unhappiness or both And again, the more rapacious this desire, the sooner it must eat up all the innocent sources of pleasure and pass on to those the Ene we have recently erous to us than perhaps, they have ever been, "lo" and "high-brow" artists alike being now daily drawn into fresh, and still fresh, excesses of lasciviousness, unreason, cruelty, and pride Finally, the desire for novelty is indispensable if we are to produce Fashions or Vogues

The use of Fashions in thought is to distract the attention of ers We direct the fashionable outcry of each generation against those vices of which it is least in danger and fix its approval on the virtue nearest to that vice which we are trying toabout with fire extinguishers whenever there is a flood, and all crowding to that side of the boat which is already nearly gunwale under Thus we ers of enthusias worldly and lukewar them all Byronic and drunk with eers of the ainst Sentiainst Respectability, lecherous ones against Puritans to be slaves or tyrants we reatest triu into a philosophy so that nonsense in the intellect eneral Evolutionary or Historical character of ht (partly our work) comes in so useful The Enemy loves platitudes Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very sihteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Noe can keep eneral ressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?" they will neglect the relevant questions And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help the in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend thereat work has already been done Once they knew that soes were for the better, and others for the worse, and others again indifferent We have largely reed" we have substituted the enant" We have trained them to think of the Future as a pro which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is,

Your affectionate uncle

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