Go to Heaven - Upset Hell!

C. S. Lewis - Screwtape Letters

Background - Screwtape, a senior devil, has been coaching Wormwood, a junior tempter, how to lure a male human away from “the Enemy” and into hell. Wormwood’s “patient” became a Christian and has been killed in the German bombing of London. Screwtape describes to Wormwood the feelings in hell.

My Dear Wormwood, you have let a soul slip through your fingers. The howl of sharpened famine for that loss re-echoes at this moment through all the levels of Hell down to the very Throne itself. It makes me mad to think of it.

How well I know what happened at the instant when they snatched him from you! There was a sudden clearing of his eyes (was there not?) as he saw you for the first time, and recognized the part you had had in him and knew that you had it no longer. Just think (and let it be the beginning of your agony) what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore, as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment.

The more one thinks about it, the worse it becomes. He got through so easily! One moment it seemed to be all our world; the scream of bombs, the heart cold with horrors, the brain reeling; next moment this was all gone, gone like a bad dream, never again to be of any account.
Defeated, out-maneuvered fool! Did you mark how naturally—as if he'd been born for it—the earthborn vermin entered the new life? How all his doubts became, in the twinkling of an eye, ridiculous?

As he saw you, he also saw Them. I know how it was. You reeled back dizzy and blinded, more hurt by them than he had ever been by bombs. The degradation of it!—that this thing of earth and slime could stand upright and converse with spirits before whom you, a spirit, could only cower. He had not the faintest conception till that very hour of how they would look, and, at times, even doubted their existence. But when he saw them he knew that he had always known them and he realized what part each one of them had played at many an hour in his life when he had supposed himself alone. Recognition made him free in their company almost before the limbs of his corpse became quiet. Only you were left outside.

He saw not only Them; your patient also saw Him. This animal, this thing begotten in a bed, could look on Him. What is blinding, suffocating fire to you, is now cool light to him, is clarity itself, and wears the form of a Man.

~ Posted by Ed Ditto