Screwtape

From Screwtape Letters

Dear Wormwood,

Obviously you are making excellent progress. My only fear is lest in attempting to hurry the patient you awaken him to a sense of his real position. For you and I, who see that position as it really is, must never forget how totally different it ought to appear to him. We know that we have introduced a change of direction in his course which is already carrying him out of his orbit around the Enemy; but he must be made to imagine that all the choices which have effected this change of course are trivial and revocable. He must not be allowed to suspect that he is now, however slowly, heading right away from the sun on a line which will carry him into the cold and dark of utmost space.
For this reason I am almost glad to hear that he is still a church-goer and a communicant. I know there are dangers in this but anything is better than that he should realize the break he has made with the first months of his Christian life As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same as it was six weeks ago. And as long as he thinks that we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognized sin , but with only a vague, though uneasy feeling that he" hasn't been doing very well lately."
As this condition becomes more fully established, you will be gradulally freed from the tiresome business of providing "Pleasures as temptations", ...You no longer need a good book, which he really likes, to keep him from his prayers or his work or his sleep; a column of advertisements in yesterdays paper will do,..... You can make him waste his time not only in conversations he enjoys with people whom he likes, but in conversations with those he cares nothing about on subjects that bore him. You can make him do nothing at all for long periods. You can keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthly and out-going activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at least he may say, as one of my own patients said on his arrival down here. 'I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked'. *** The Christians describe the Enemy as one 'without whom Nothing is strong'. And Nothing is very strong ; strong enough to steal away a man's best years not in sweet sins. but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why; in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them, in drumming of fingers and kicking of heels,. in whistling tunes that he does not like or in the long dim labyrinth of reveries that have not even lust or ambition to give them relish, but which, once chance association has started them, the creature is too weak and fuddled to shake off.
Do remember the only thing that matters is the extent to which you seperate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the work. Indeed the safest road to Hell ( and an ineffective- wasted life) is the gradual one- the gentle slope, soft underfoot,without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.

Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape

If you have never read Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis you need to. Everytime I get to read some or all of it, I am reminded how we can be so very blind. I would love to hear what others think of this passage. :)