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About the high-low quarrels in the Church, whatever the merits of the dispute are, the ‘heat’ is simply and solely Sin, and I think parsons ought to preach on it from that angle.
By the way, the ‘conversation-piece’ by Paul & Mini is really excellent. I hope you will all go on having a lovely time. God bless you all.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W): TS
REF.52/205.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
6th May 1952.
Dear Mrs. Berners-Price,
Many thanks for your letter of the 4th. This is most kind of you, and I will very gladly accept your hospitality for the night of Wednesday 7th, tomorrow;
(#ulink_6a2f443d-14f6-53f0-a083-33b7a5f264ab) I should like to stop over Thursday too, but I fear that will be impossible. Indeed nothing but the Majesty of the Law would have got me out of Oxford for one night at the present moment. I come by a train which reaches Ramsgate at 6.8 p.m.
Yours gratefully,
C. S. Lewis
(modern blotting paper!)
(#ulink_b5d7711a-8aa4-52b3-ac38-de004ba7261c)
TO THE EDITOR OF THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT:
(#ulink_a7384dca-d8ac-50c4-bd2e-d13e795c4b05)
Sir,–
The authorship of The Sheepheards Slumber (No. 133 in Englands Helicon, beginning ‘In Pescod time, when Hound to Home’) is not stated in any edition that I have been able to consult. The poem will be found in A pleasaunte Laborinth called Churchyardes Chance etc. London. Ihon Kyngston 1580. It is there entitled A matter of fonde Cupid, and vain Venus.
C. S. Lewis
TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
May 9th 1952
Dear Mrs Berners Price
Thanks to you and your husband the trial now looms so small in the total adventure that I feel more like a man back from a holiday than a witness released from the box: not that it was a box, neither, being more like a nursery fender.
The actual scene in court was horrid. I never saw Justice at work before, and it is not a pretty sight. Any creature, even an animal, at bay, surrounded by its enemies, is a dreadful thing to see: one felt one was committing a sort of indecency by being present. What did impress me was the absence of any resentment or vindictiveness on the part of the witnesses: you two victims especially were, I thought, getting v. high marks. But, as I say, what I really remember most is a delightful visit to very nice people in a charming house. I am sorry I left my kind host without even a hand-shake: but my doom was upon me.
May I now book a room at Courtstairs (in the ordinary way) for the night of May 18th? I think Walsh said he wd. drive us to Canterbury on the morning of the 19th. I expect I can get on from Canterbury on the afternoon of the 19th.
I enclose ‘PC’
(#ulink_b4492a15-f88a-534b-ba5f-7b9581961a76) for Penelope.
(#ulink_3877c9b6-2ae7-5a33-850d-5a30e4fbb4db) And once again many, many thanks. I don’t really know why you should have been so kind to a stranger, whose very name must have rather sinister associations in both your minds by now!
Yours sincerely
C. S. Lewis
TO ‘MRS LOCKLEY (L):
[Magdalen College]
13/5/52
Dear ‘Mrs Lockley’
In Bp. Gore’s ‘Sermon on the mount’…I find the view that Christ forbade ‘divorce in such a sense as allowed re-marriage’.
(#ulink_a53d524b-fade-5a24-a9cd-90d21ec32bf8) The question is whether He made an exception by allowing divorce in such a sense as allowed re-marriage when the divorce was for adultery. In the Eastern Church re-marriage of the innocent party is allowed: not in the Roman. The Anglican Bps. at Lambeth in 1888 denied re-marriage to the guilty party, and added that ‘there has always been a difference of opinion in the Ch. as to whether Our Lord meant to forbid re-marriage of the innocent party in a divorce’.
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It wd. seem then that the only question is whether you can divorce your husband in such a sense as wd. make you free to re-marry. I imagine that nothing is further from your thoughts. I believe that you are free as a Christian woman to divorce him especially since the refusal to do so does harm to the innocent children of his mistress: but that you must (or should) regard yourself as no more free to marry another man than if you had not divorced him. But remember I’m no authority on such matters, and I hope you will ask the advice of one or two sensible clergymen of our own Church.
Our own Vicar whom I have just rung up, says that there are Anglican theologians who say that you must not divorce him. His own view was that in doubtful cases the Law of Charity shd. always be the over-riding consideration, and in a case such as yours charity directs you to divorce him…
TO NELL BERNERS-PRICE (W):
Magdalen College,
Oxford
May 14th 1952
Dear Mrs. Berners-Price
Those plaguey police (they seem to live on my telephone at present: it might be less trouble to be the prisoner than to be a witness!) have just rung to say that the trial will probably not be on May 19th after all and I’m to wait till I get a notice. So may I cancel my room at Courtstairs for the 18th? You’ll let me know if I’ve involved you in any loss, won’t you? And I shall probably be wiring for a room some other night when I’ve got the notice. Heigh-ho!
All the best to both of you, and Penelope. I wish the dog cd. be put in the witness box.
Yours ever
C. S. Lewis
TO WAYLAND HILTON YOUNG (W): TS
REF.52/219.
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
15th May 1952.
Dear Hilton-Young,
I’ve no car and no wireless. You might try Professor G. Driver (this College) for a reading list on the Judith period.
(#ulink_b3d7db78-4e94-565f-b326-40171931d350) But do take care: a story already very well told in an ancient text, is a bad thing to work on. The only hope is that the Babylonian stuff might start interesting you for its own sake, and lead to a quite new story in that setting. Otherwise…is there a single success in re-telling an ancient story with modern novelistic technique? It is stark ruin.
Thanks very much for the kind suggestion, but no can do. I am tangled up (only as witness) in a trial, and can make no plans. All good wishes,
Yours,
C. S. Lewis
TO GENIA GOELZ (L/P):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
15 May 1952
Dear Genia
Thanks for your letter of the 9th. All our prayers are being answered and I thank God for it. The only (possibly, not necessarily) unfavourable symptom is that you are just a trifle too excited.
(#ulink_9925e2a2-5aa0-5326-8835-afe5bc773e59) It is quite right that you should feel that ‘something terrific’ has happened to you (it has) and be ‘all glowy’. Accept these sensations with thankfulness as birthday cards from God, but remember that they are only greetings, not the real gift. I mean, it is not the sensations that are the real thing. The real thing is the gift of the Holy Spirit which can’t usually be—perhaps not ever—experienced as a sensation or emotion. The sensations are merely the response of your nervous system. Don’t depend on them. Otherwise when they go and you are once more emotionally flat (as you certainly will be quite soon), you might think that the real thing had gone too. But it won’t. It will be there when you can’t feel it. May even be most operative when you can feel it least.
Don’t imagine it is all ‘going to be an exciting adventure from now on’. It won’t. Excitement, of whatever sort, never lasts. This is the push to start you off on your first bicycle: you’ll be left to [do] lots of dogged pedalling later on. And no need to be depressed about it either. It will be good for your spiritual leg muscles. So enjoy the push while it lasts, but enjoy it as a treat, not as something normal.
Of course, none of us have ‘any right’ at the altar. You might as well talk of a non-existent person ‘having a right’ to be created. It is not our right but God’s free bounty. An English peer said, ‘I like the order of the Garter because it has no dam’ nonsense about merit!
(#ulink_03161236-46b2-583e-a0ea-77c5d14e5b6b) Nor has Grace. And we must keep on remembering that as a cure for Pride.
Yes, pride is a perpetual nagging temptation. Keep on knocking it on the head but don’t be too worried about it. As long as one knows one is proud one is safe from the worst form of pride.
If Hoyle
(#ulink_ed3bd02e-afe2-51ec-b4bc-3b556c28f47a) answers your letter, then let the correspondence drop. He is not a great philosopher (and none of my scientific colleagues think much of him as a scientist), but he is strong enough to do some harm. You’re not David and no one has told you to fight Goliath! You’ve only just enlisted. Don’t go off challenging enemy champions. Learn your drill. I hope this doesn’t sound all like cold water! I can’t tell you how pleased I was with your letter.
God bless you.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
TO SHELDON VANAUKEN (BOD): TS
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
16th May 1952.
Thank you both very much. It will give me great pleasure to dine with you at 7.30 on May 29th. I shall presume ordinary clothes, unless I hear from you to the contrary.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
In May 1952 John H. McCallum of Harcourt, Brace & World, New York, invited Lewis to contribute an article on Edmund Spenser to Volume I of Major British Writers, under the general editorship of G. B. Harrison. Lewis accepted, and his extant correspondence with Harcourt, Brace & World begins with the following letter:
TO JOHN H. MCCALLUM (P):
Magdalen College,
Oxford.
May 21st 1952
Dear Mr. McCallum,
Thank you for yours of the 16th. I think I shall be able to keep all your ‘suggested rules’ except the first. The proportion 15, 45, 20 for Life, General Essay, Particular Analysis wd. not really be suitable for Spenser. The materials for his life do not really add up to a ‘character’: I don’t mean that I couldn’t write one, but if I did I should be contributing to historical fiction. Nor is his kind of poetry one which would yield much under detailed analysis of short passages. The chief thing we must do, indeed, is to encourage readers to remember that he is a romancier, à long haleine.
(#ulink_15dfab22-56d2-5fdf-8dcd-c905db890b32) I cd. accept your suggested proportions alright if I were doing Milton: but they’d ruin an Introduction to Spenser.
My selections will be all from Faerie Queene and Epíthalamíon:
(#ulink_b5590339-27c9-5be1-908b-58e48d030932) there’s no room for anything else. The bits from EQ. will be often arranged so as to yield something like continuous narrative: as soon as I looked into the matter I saw that a mere conglomeration of the best single stanzas wd. give no idea of his quality and wd., indeed, be almost unreadable. I hope this meets with your approval.
Yours sincerely,
C. S. Lewis
TO JOAN PILE (W):
Magdalen College,
