Advice From One Devil to Another~

 This morning I want to give you one more excerpt from The Screwtape Letters. I hope you'll read it with thoughtfulness and decide if it's relevant to your own life. As I've said, it is a different perspective of what goes on in the non-physical world every moment of time. As hard as that is to conceive--which is exactly what Satan wants--we must do our best to be aware of the battle of good and evil for our own sakes and that of the world. This excerpt is about extremes--a problem for many of us right now in a world that is creating extremes from which to choose daily. Remember that this is written while a war is going on for Great Britain.

Senior devil Screwtape to junior devil Wormwood:

"I had not forgotten my promise to consider whether we should make the patient an extreme patriot or an extreme pacifist. All extremes except extreme devotion to the Enemy [God] are to be encouraged...." 

"Whichever he adopts, your main task will be the same. Let him begin by treating the Patriotism or the Pacifism as a part of his religion. Then let him, under the influence of partisan spirit, come to regard it as the most important part. Then quietly and gradually nurse him on to the stage at which the religion becomes merely part of the "Cause," in which Christianity is valued chiefly because of the excellent arguments it can produce in favour of the British war effort or of pacifism. The attitude which you want to guard against is that in which temporal affairs are treated primarily as material for obedience. Once you have made the World an end, and faith a means, you have almost won your man, and it makes very little difference what kind of worldly end he is pursuing. Provided that meetings, pamphlets, policies, movements, causes, and crusades matter more to him than prayers and sacraments and charity, he is ours--and the more "religious" (on those terms), the more securely ours. I could show you a pretty cageful down here."

Perhaps you don't agree with the philosophy of C. S. Lewis about the subject of extremes--or any other subject for that matter. My idea is to give you a way to "think out of the box," so to speak. To jolt your intellect into real thinking--some of the meat as opposed to the cereal. And I expect you to simply choose for yourself whether it is valuable to you or not. 

Blessings...Mimi