A Well of Wonder. Clyde S. Kilby

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СКАЧАТЬ he had the opportunity to learn more about writers such as G. K. Chesterton and George MacDonald. Through them the Hound drew nearer and made it clear enough that Lewis was his prey.

      Early in 1919 Lewis was back at University College, Oxford. There he met men of high intelligence who were Christians, or at least theistic, in their thinking. One of them, Owen Barfield, was destined to be his lifelong friend. Barfield had read, said Lewis, all the right books but had got the wrong things out of them. Lengthy and warm debates with Barfield and others forced him to a careful reexamination of the foundations of his atheism. Meanwhile Lewis went on to highest honors, taught for a year at University College, and then was chosen a fellow of Magdalen College, a position he was to hold for thirty years.

      Lewis continued to be troubled by what looked like the finger of God pointing directly at him. On the one side were Christian colleagues and on the other side one shattering experience with “the hardest boiled of all the atheists” he had known. This man sat in Lewis’s room before the fire and finally blurted out, “Rum thing. . . . All that stuff of Frazer’s about the Dying God. Rum thing. It almost looks as if it had really happened once.” So a second atheist was added to the Old Knock in the process of turning Lewis toward God.

      Lewis’s account of how God finally came to him must be read just as he puts it:

You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. . . . I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England. I did not then see what is now the most shining and obvious thing; the Divine humility which will accept a convert even on such terms.²

      The rest of his life was to consist of teaching and writing. If that seems a dull business, remember that Lewis’s adventures among ideas were as exciting as the exploits of a big-game hunter or an Alpine climber. He became one of the great teachers of his time. His lectures were always crowded. One of his students said that he had at his fingertips more knowledge than he had ever known in any other scholar, and another said that Lewis had “the most exact and penetrating mind” he had ever encountered.

      Lewis’s conversion brought to him the long-sought joy, and soon he was writing books about Christianity. Millions of copies of them have been sold. Though many of his books treat their subjects directly, such as Miracles, The Problem of Pain, and Mere Christianity, perhaps his best-loved books are of the creative variety. Would you like to make a trip to hell and examine its fondest hopes and its strategy for winning souls? Would you care to know the subtleties of Satan that surround you and are intent at this moment on destroying you? Would you care to learn what happens to a particular imp who lets a soul slip through his fingers into the hands of the “Enemy”? If so, you can go to Lewis’s most popular (though 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.

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