A letter from hell由刀豆文库小编整理，希望给你工作、学习、生活带来方便，猜你可能喜欢“aletterhome课文”。
A letter from hell C.S.Lewis My Dear Wormwood, I note that you say about guiding your patient's reading and taking care that he sees a good deal of his material fiend.But are you not being a trifle naive?It sounds as if you supposed that argument was to keep him out of the Enemy's clutches.That might have been so if he had lived a few centuries earlier.At that time the humans still knew pretty well when a thing was proved and when it was not;and if it was proved they really believed it.They still connected thinking with doing and were prepared to alter their way of life as the result of a chain of reasoning.But what with the weekly pre and other such weapons we have largely altered that.Your man has been accustomed,ever since he was a boy,to have a dozen incompatible philosophies dancing about together inside his head.He doesn't think of doctrines as primarily “true” of “false”, but as “academic” or “practical”,“outworn” or “contemporary”,“conventional” or “ruthle”.Jargon, not argument, is your best ally in keeping him from the Church.Don't waste time trying to make him think that materialism is true!Make him think it is strong,or stark, or courageous--that it is the philosophy of the future.That's the sort of thing he cares about.The trouble about argument is that it moves the whole struggle onto the Enemy's own ground.He can argue too;whereas in really practical propaganda of the kind I am suggesting.He has been shown for centuries to be greatly the inferior of Our Father Below.By the very act of arguing,you awake the patient's reason;and once it is awake,who can foresee the result?Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in you patrent the fatal habit of attending to universal iues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences.Your busine is to fix his attention on the stream.Teach him to call it “real life” and don't let him ask what he means by “real”.Remember, he is not , like you, a pure spirit.Never having been a human(Oh that abominable advantage of the Enemy's!)you don't realize how enslaved they are to the preure of the ordinary.I once had a patient, a sound atheist, who used to read in the British Museum.One day, as he sat reading, I saw a train of thought in his mind beginning to go the wrong way.The Enemy, of course, was at his elbow in a moment.Before I knew where I was I saw my twenty year's work beginning to totter.If I had lost my head and begun to attempt a defence by argument I should have been undone.But I was not such a fool.I struck instantly at the part of the man which I had best under my control and suggested that it was just about time he had some lunch.The Enemy presumably made the counter-suggestion that this was more important than lunch.At least I think that must have been His line for when I said “ Quite.In fact much too important to tackle at the end of a morning,” the patient brightened up consideraby;and by the time I had added “ Much better come back after lunch and go into it with a fesh mind,” he was already half way to the door.Once he was in the street the battle was won.I showed him a newsboy shouting the midday paper, and a No.73 bus going past, and before he reached the bottom of the steps I had got into him an unaltered conviction that, whatever odd ideas might come into a man's head when he was shut up alone with his books, a healthy dose of “ real life ”(by which he meant the bus and the newsboy)was enough to show him that all “that sort of thing” just couldn't be true.He knew he'd had a narrow escape and in later years was fond of talking about “that inarticulate sense for actuality which is our ultimate safeguard against the aberrations of mere logic”, He is now safe in Our Father's house.You begins to see the point? Thanks to procees which we set at work in them centuries age, they find it all but impoible to believe in unfamiliar while the familiar is before their eyes.Keep preing home on him the ordinarine of things.Above all, do not attempt to use science(I mean, the ral sciences)as a defence against Christianity.They will positively encourage him to think about realities he can't touch and see.There have been ad cases among the modern physicists.If he must dabble in science, keep him on economics and sociology;don't let him get away from that invaluable “real life”.But the best of all is to let him read no science but to give him a grand general idea that he knows it all and that everything he happens to have picked up in casual talk and reading is “the results of modern investigation”.Do remember you are there to fuddle him.From the way some of you young fiends talk, anyone would suppose ti was our job to teach!Your affectionate uncle Screwtape
