Compelling Reason. C. S. Lewis

COPYRIGHT

      William Collins

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

      First published in Great Britain by Fount Paperbacks in 1996

      This ebook edition published by William Collins in 2017

      Copyright © 1996 C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd

      Foreword copyright © 1996 C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd

      Walter Hooper asserts the moral right to be identified as the compiler of this work

      The material in this compilation was previously published in: ‘First and Second Things’, first published in Undeceptions by Geoffrey Bles, London 1971; first Fount Paperbacks edition published in 1985 (essays 2, 3, 6, 10, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21); copyright © 1985 C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd. ‘Present Concerns’, first published in 1986 by Fount Paperbacks (essays 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 17, 22, 23); copyright © 1986 C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd. ‘Timeless at Heart’, first published in 1987 by Fount Paperbacks (essays 1, 12, 14, 19, 20, 24); copyright © 1970, 1980, 1987 C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd

      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, downloaded, 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 hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008220884

      Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008228514

      Version: 2017-05-24

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

Copyright

Foreword by Douglas Gresham

1 Why I Am Not a Pacifist

2 Bulverism

3 First and Second Things

4 Equality

5 Three Kinds of Men

6 ‘Horrid Red Things’

7 Democratic Education

       8 A Dream

       9 Is English Doomed?

       10 Meditation in a Toolshed

       11 Hedonics

       12 Christian Apologetics

       13 The Decline of Religion

       14 Religion Without Dogma?

       15 Vivisection

       16 Modern Translations of the Bible

       17 On Living in an Atomic Age

       18 The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment

       19 The Pains of Animals

       20 Is Theism Important?

       21 Xmas and Christmas

       22 Prudery and Philology

       23 Is History Bunk?

       24 Willing Slaves of the Welfare State

       Original Sources

       Footnotes

       About the Author

       Other Books By C.S. Lewis

       About the Publisher

FOREWORD

      This book is not a collection of hitherto unpublished work, it is a collection of essays which are not presently in print but which Murray White of HarperCollins and myself thought should remain available to the reading public. One of the legacies which one inherits from a great writer is the responsibility to try to ensure that his minor works do not vanish from publication, or at the very least that they do not vanish until people no longer want to read them.

      In this volume, we have tried to select those essays of Jack’s (C. S. Lewis) which are applicable to today’s world and still very much in demand. Jack said that a writer should not try to be ‘modern’ or ‘up to date’ because the more that he achieves it, the more he ensures that in a very short time he will be ‘out of date’. And it is this ability to achieve timelessness which so characterizes the best of Jack’s essays and articles. It is inevitable that some of what Jack wrote is coloured and affected by his upbringing and the environment in which he lived, but the crystal clarity of his thinking frequently enabled him to cut through the shrouds of his era and reach to the very heart of matters which will concern men and women