A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby
he himself did not at all feel his best) book, The Screwtape Letters.
Or would you like to take a bus trip with people going from hell to heaven and hear the earnest appeal of celestial beings for them to come in, as well as listen to the excuses for not doing so? You can hear the claims of people who do not believe in heaven, even one famous preacher, while they are looking at a part of its glory. You can meet the man who has “done his best” all his life and now wants what he thinks is due him. Or you can meet the man who thinks heaven is just another trick of “the Management.” Or you can meet the woman who on earth hounded her husband literally to death in her efforts to promote him in business and society and refuses heaven unless she will be allowed there to take charge of him again. If you would like to observe that, as Lewis insists, people in hell really choose that malign place, you can read it all in The Great Divorce.
Or if you would rather take a space journey, you can go to an unfallen planet and there see another Eve undergoing the temptation to disobey. There a very evil man and a good one meet this lady in her own glorious surroundings and each endeavors to persuade her to his viewpoint. The reader has an intimate and startling experience of what Eden and the temptation might have been like, as well as an insight into the far-reaching and subtle grounds of that temptation. All this is in Perelandra.
Or one may go to Lewis’s seven much-loved stories for children and discover not only charming adventures but also little episodes that put the gospel clearer than many a sermon. In one of them, for instance, a little girl wants a drink of water but finds the lion Aslan (Christ) between her and the water.
“Are you not thirsty?” said the Lion.
“I’m dying of thirst,” said Jill.
“Then drink,” said the Lion.
“May I—could I—would you mind going away while I do?” said Jill.
The Lion answered this only by a look and a very low growl. . . .
“I daren’t come and drink,” said Jill.
“Then you will die of thirst,” said the Lion.
“Oh dear!” said Jill, coming another step nearer. “I suppose I must go and look for another stream then.”
“There is no other stream,” said the Lion.3
In another of the books the idea that a Christian lives in daily contact with God is suggested when the youngsters, voyaging into a far-off country, come upon a place where a sumptuous table is set. They inquire and learn that it is Aslan’s table.
“Why is it called Aslan’s table?” asked Lucy presently.
“It is set here by his bidding.”
“But how does the food keep?” asked the practical Eustace.
“It is eaten, and renewed, every day,” said the girl.4
And we could hardly imagine a finer depiction of the necessity for divine salvation than that in another of the children’s books. A boy called Eustace Scrubb had accidentally gone along on the voyage of the Dawn Treader. He hated the other children and made all the trouble he could. When they came to an uninhabited island far away, he ran off from the group and in the course of events was turned into a dragon. Shocked through and through to realize his terrible condition, he longed to be a boy again (and a good one). In his terror, he remembered that snakes cast off their skins and thought it might also be true of dragons. He got a rent made and managed to slip off his entire skin.
He was happy until he looked in a well of water and found another skin on his body that was just as ugly and knobbly as the first. Again he managed to pull off this skin, but again underneath was another that was no better. Finally Aslan said, “You will have to let me undress you.” Eustace was afraid of Asian’s claws, but being desperate now for relief, he lay down and let Asian take over.
This is how Eustace told the story to his friends later:
The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt.
Well, he pulled the beastly stuff right off—just as I thought I’d done it myself the other three times, only they hadn’t hurt—and there it was lying on the grass only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly looking than the others had been.”5
Afterward Aslan bathed him in the water (baptism) and dressed him in clothes, and Eustace never again was the cantankerous child he had been.
A truly fresh air blows through Lewis’s books. Though his ideas are profound, his words are as simple as can be. One American who visited Lewis summarized him well. “You find yourself using his ideas and forgetting that they are his. His mind seems a colossal picture-making machine, and each picture reduces a great and terrible theological abstraction to the clarity of a Gospel parable. He moves in on you, and possesses the stray ends of your imagination, not by the color and fire of his intellectual pyrotechnics, as his enemies assert, but rather by the simple reality of his service to your spirit.” Like the greatest writers, he knew how to take simple things and make them illustrate profound things.
He was anything but a solemn, long-faced saint. In fact, he once said, “I’m not the religious type.” He once went to address a congregation wearing a lounge coat, slacks, and tennis shoes. He had little use for hymns and hated organ music. He usually attended the early service in his little parish church in order to have a minimum of music and sermon. He so ardently loved the outdoors that on one particularly beautiful day he stood outside and dictated to his secretary through the open window. He loved sitting with friends and swapping jokes. It was his “unsaintly” attitude, together with his unanswerable logic, that made him, as Chad Walsh says, the apostle to the skeptics. One of them said, “His books exposed the shallowness of our atheist prejudices; his vision illumined the Mystery which lay behind the appearances of daily life.”
In a BBC address, Lewis said, “All I’m doing is to get people to face the facts—to understand the questions which Christianity claims to answer.”
C. E. M. Joad, professor of philosophy at the University of London, said of Lewis, “He had the rare gift of being able to make righteousness readable.” Like St. Augustine, Lewis was deeply convinced that no man will ever find rest until he rests in God, indeed that a man will never really be a man until he recognizes God’s rights to him. The only real face is the face turned in contrition and gratitude to God.
Perhaps his greatest fear had to do with the ease and subtlety with which even a man’s best acts become tinged with selfishness. Though always perhaps a bit more decent than the average man, Lewis says that when he examined himself before God about the time of his conversion, he found within what appalled him, “a zoo of lusts, a bedlam of ambitions, a nursery of fears, a harem of fondled hatreds.” He saw the necessity for a Christian to commit himself anew every morning to God and really to live the life commanded. “Nothing you have not given away will ever be yours,” he said. Also, “Until you have given yourself up to Him you will never have any real self.” He believed that God calls Christians to perfection and that the whole of life is a preparation for even further training in the next until God fulfills quite literally his promise of perfection.
What Lewis genuinely believed in and attempted to practice was a life of holiness. He saw true holiness not as a dull and negative sort of thing but as something irresistible, and he believed that if even 10 percent of Christians had holiness the world speedily would be converted. One close friend said that he saw in Lewis what he had never seen in any other man—“In Lewis the natural and the supernatural seemed to be one, to flow one into the other.” Lewis did not have many enemies, but some of those he had simply could not understand a man, and especially a man as lively as he, seriously intent on holiness.
The wide range of interest in Lewis is suggested by two letters I happened to receive in the same mail. One was from a Boston wool merchant who said,