- 28 Mar 2021 02:05
#15163310
I'm sure everyone knows of C.S. Lewis's excellent piece of theology serially published a few years into WWII, then collected and published as The Screwtape Letters. What few are likely to know--I didn't myself until today--is that Lewis published a short sequel (15+ pages) to that work in The Saturday Evening Post in 1959 and then in the collection of essays The World's Last Night in 1960, a few years before his death--Screwtape Proposes a Toast (full text available). I'm posting this here rather than the Spiritualism subforum of The Agora because the thrust of the essay is really more political than theological (though there is that, as well), a prophetic view of the future of trends Lewis saw in the political and educational institutions of his day. It's well worth a read, even if you don't agree with the theology it is couched in.
Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without.
—Edmund Burke
—Edmund Burke