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XXVII

MY DEAR WORMWOOD,

You seeood at present The use of his "love" to distract his mind from the Enemy is, of course, obvious, but you reveal what poor use you areof it when you say that the whole question of distraction and the wandering mind has now become one of the chief subjects of his prayers That ely failed When this, or any other distraction, crosses his e him to thrust it away by sheer will power and to try to continue the nor had happened; once he accepts the distraction as his present problem and lays that before the Enemy and makes it the main the good, you have done har hi run

A pro Now that he is in love, a new idea of earthly happiness has arisen in his ency in his purely petitionary prayers - about this war and other suchintellectual difficulties about prayer of that sort False spirituality is always to be encouraged On the seeround that "praise and communion with God is the true prayer", humans can often be lured into direct disobedience to the Ene way) has definitely told them to pray for their daily bread and the recovery of their sick You will, of course, conceal from him the fact that the prayer for daily bread, interpreted in a "spiritual sense", is really just as crudely petitionary as it is in any other sense

But since your patient has contracted the terrible habit of obedience, he will probably continue such "crude" prayers whatever you do But you can worry hi suspicion that the practice is absurd and can have no objective result Don’t forget to use the "heads I win, tails you lose" argu he prays for doesn’t happen, then that is one more proof that petitionary prayers don’t work; if it does happen, he will, of course, be able to see some of the physical causes which led up to it, and "therefore it would have happened anyway", and thus a granted prayer becoood a proof as a denied one that prayers are ineffective

You, being a spirit, will find it difficult to understand how he gets into this confusion But you must remember that he takes Time for an ultimate reality He supposes that the Enes as present, remembers others as past, and anticipates others as future; or even if he believes that the Enes that way, yet, in his heart of hearts, he regards this as a peculiarity of the Enemy’s h he would say he did) that things as the Enes as they are! If you tried to explain to him that men’s prayers today are one of the innumerable coordinates hich the Enemy harmonises the weather of tomorrow, he would reply that then the Ene to make those prayers and, if so, they did not pray freely but were predestined to do so And he would add that the weather on a given day can be traced back through its causes to the original creation of , both on the huo" What he ought to say, of course, is obvious to us; that the proble the particular weather to the particular prayers is merely the appearance, at two points in his te the whole spiritual universe to the whole corporeal universe; that creation in its entirety operates at every point of space and time, or rather that their kind of consciousness forces them to encounter the whole, self-consistent creative act as a series of successive events Why that creative act leaves room for their free will is the problem of problems, the secret behind the Enemy’s nonsense about "Love" How it does so is no proble their free contributions in a future, but sees the so in His unbounded Now And obviously to watch ais not to make him do it

It may be replied that some meddlesome human writers, notably Boethius, have let this secret out But in the intellectual clihout Western Europe, you needn’t bother about that Only the learned read old books and we have now so dealt with the learned that they are of allso We have done this by inculcating The Historical Point of View The Historical Point of View, put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true He asks who influenced the ancient writer, and how far the statement is consistent hat he said in other books, and what phase in the writer’s developht, it illustrates, and how it affected later writers, and how often it has been ues) and what the general course of criticism on it has been for the last ten years, and what is the "present state of the question" To regard the ancient writer as a possible source of knowledge - to anticipate that what he said could possibly hts or your behaviour - this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded And since we cannot deceive the whole human race all the tieneration off fro es there is always the danger that the characteristic errors of one may be corrected by the characteristic truths of another But thanks be to our Father and the Historical Point of View, great scholars are now as little nourished by the past as the norant mechanic who holds that "history is bunk",

Your affectionate uncle

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