Screwtape Proposes a Toast. C. S. Lewis

COPYRIGHT

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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      London SE1 9GF

       www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      First published in Great Britain by Fontana Books in 1965

      This eBook edition published by William Collins in 2017

      Copyright © 1965 C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd

      © in ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’ Helen Joy Lewis, 1959

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008192532

      Ebook Edition © July 2017 ISBN: 9780008228545

      Version: 2017-05-22

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Preface and Acknowledgements

Screwtape Proposes a Toast

      AN ADDRESS

The Inner Ring

      AN ORATION

       Is Theology Poetry?

      A PAPER

       On Obstinacy in Belief

      A PAPER

       Transposition

      A SERMON

       The Weight of Glory

      A SERMON

       Good Work and Good Works

      A PAPER

       A Slip of the Tongue

      A SERMON

       Footnotes

       About the Author

       Other Books By C.S. Lewis

       About the Publisher

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

      C. S. Lewis had finished putting this book together shortly before his death on 22nd November 1963. It is devoted almost entirely to religion and the pieces are derived from various sources. Some of them have appeared in They Asked for a Paper (Geoffrey Bles, London 1962, 21s.), a collection whose subjects included literature, ethics and theology. ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’ was initially published in Great Britain as part of a hard-covered book called The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast (Geoffrey Bles, London 1961, 12s. 6d.). This consisted of the original ‘The Screwtape Letters’, together with the ‘Toast’, and also a new preface by Lewis. Meantime, ‘Screwtape Proposes a Toast’ had already appeared in the United States, first as an article in The Saturday Evening Post and then during 1960 in a hard-covered collection, The World’s Last Night (Harcourt Brace and World, New York).

      In the new preface for The Screwtape Letters and Screwtape Proposes a Toast, which we have reprinted in this book, Lewis explains the conception and birth of the ‘Toast’. It would be quite wrong to call the address ‘another Screwtape letter’. What he described as the technique of ‘diabolical ventriloquism’ is indeed still there: Screwtape’s whites are our blacks and whatever he welcomes we should dread. But, whilst the form still broadly persists, there its affinity to the original Letters ends. They were mainly concerned with the moral life of an individual; in the ‘Toast’ the substance of the quest is now rather the need to respect and foster the mind of the young boy and girl.

      ‘A Slip of the Tongue’ (a sermon preached in Magdalene College Chapel) appears in a book for the first time. ‘The Inner Ring’ was a Memorial Oration delivered at King’s College, University of London in 1944; ‘Is Theology Poetry?’ and ‘On Obstinacy in Belief’ were both papers read to the Socratic Club, subsequently first appearing in the ‘Socratic Digest’ in 1944 and 1955 respectively. ‘Transposition’ is a slightly fuller version of a sermon preached in Mansfield College, Oxford; whilst ‘The Weight of Glory’ was a sermon given in the Church of St. Mary the Virgin, Oxford, and first published by SPCK. All these five papers were published by kind permission in They Asked for a Paper. ‘Good Work and Good Works’ first appeared in The Catholic Art Quarterly and then in The World’s Last Night.

      At the end of his preface to They Asked for a Paper, Lewis wrote: ‘Since these papers were composed at various times during the last twenty years, passages in them which some readers may find reminiscent of my later work are in fact anticipatory or embryonic. I have allowed myself to be persuaded that such overlaps were not a fatal objection to their republication.’ We are delighted that he allowed himself to be persuaded in the same way over this paperback collection of pieces on religious themes.

      J.E.G.

SCREWTAPE PROPOSES A TOAST

       I was often asked or advised to add to the original “Screwtape Letters”, but for many years I felt not the least inclination to do it. Though I had never written anything more easily, I never wrote with less enjoyment. The ease came, no doubt, from the fact that the device of diabolical letters, once you have thought of it, exploits itself spontaneously, like Swift’s big and little men, or the medical and ethical philosophy of “Erewhon”, as Anstey’s Garuda Stone. It would run away with you for a thousand pages if you gave it its head. But though it was easy to twist one’s mind into the diabolical attitude, it was not fun, or not for long. The strain produced a sort of spiritual cramp. The world into which I had to project myself while I