Thanks for your letter of June 30th. I found the poem interesting–especially metrically interesting. From that point of view 1. 3 is the important one: notice how it keeps the five beats because one is forced to give full value to the two long monosyllables-‘one goal’–

‘Remémber the ónly, the óne góal of lífe’

L.2 where you collapse into a 4 beat-rhythm is not, I think, nearly so good. ‘God speed’ at the end is a trifle weak isn’t it? And if one puts it into God’s mouth–as the context invites one to do–a little comic: like in the old miracle play where God, in a moment of excitement, is made to exclaim ‘By God!’

You know, over here people did not get that fairy-tale feeling about the coronation. What impressed most who saw it was the fact that the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it. Hence, in the spectators, a feeling of (one hardly knows how to describe it)-awe–pity–pathos–mystery. The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be His vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate. As if He said ‘In my inexorable love I shall lay upon the dust that you are glories and dangers and responsibilities beyond your understanding.’ Do you see what I mean? One has missed the whole point unless one feels that we have all been crowned and that coronation is somehow, if splendid, a tragic splendour.

I am so glad about your short but precious conversation with your granddaughter. The whole unnatural situation is v. hard for me to understand. Perhaps it will end. We must both pray.

By the way isn’t a motor-car the safest place to be in a thunderstorm: isolated from the earth by rubber tyres wh. are non-conductors? Or do I only display my ignorance?

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER IANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen

July 10th 1953

My dear Roger

Thank you very much for The Mahatma & the Hare.¹⁵³ (But you must stop doing this sort of thing: I didn’t forbid roofers in order to get presents instead!). The narrative of the hare is almost unbearable, as it was meant to be, yet unfairly, for it depends on giving poor Wat a human mind. If he had that he would perhaps have guns too. The book is impressive, and shows much more restraint than R.H. usually does in vision literature.

But far more important is your K. Arthur.¹⁵⁴ I read every word and think you have done, in general, a v. good job. The non-Malory parts are just as good as the Malory parts. You have managed the events, such as the begetting of Galahad, which present difficulties in a children’s book, with wonderful skill. The style is exactly right: no unwelcome modernity, so that only close inspection reveals the absence of archaisms. The only place where, I think, you go wrong is on pp. 275-6 where you use the word mysterious four times. It wouldn’t be a good adjective if used only once. I forget whether I have said before–and anyway I am going to say now-that Adjectives which are a direct command to the reader to feel a certain emotion are no use. In vain do we tell him that a thing was horrible, beautiful, or mysterious. We must so present it that he exclaims horrible! beautiful! or mysterious! There are exceptions but we must talk of that another time. Despite this blot, it’s a grand book: many, many thanks.

Love to all.

Yours

Jack

TO ARTHUR GREEVES (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 13/53

My dear Arthur

We have both of us been a little flustered, it seems. First you wrote a letter of wh. you sent me only part: at least, so I conclude from the fact that it had no signature and broke off in the middle of a sentence. Then I got it on a day when I was just going for a journey and lost it. So sorry. The facts are these.

Aug. 20th W. and I arrive Crawfordsburn.

Aug. 28th W. departs by L’pool boat.

Sept. 14th I depart

I hope this fits in with you?

R. L. Green has written a v. good Arthurian book for children in the Puffin series–not merely a re-telling of Malory, something much better than that, wh. he explains in the preface. I am sending you a copy when it comes out: if you want to refresh your memory of that cycle, you can get it all here with the ‘brasting’ left out.¹⁵⁵

Yours

Jack

TO VERA GEBBERT (W):

Magdalen College

Oxford

16 July 53

Dear Mrs. Gebbert

Pounds and ounces don’t need translating, for we use the same tables (plagues they were at school, too) over here. It’s babies need translating. Tho’ indeed, now that I come to think of it, I’m not much better on adult weights. I’ve no idea of my own, and can’t understand the interest of the question. I can understand people, and especially women, being interested in their shape (tho’ those who can mistake mal de mère for mal de mer¹⁵⁶ must be an exception) but there seems to be a non sequitur in relating shape to weight quite so directly as is commonly done.

Screwtape as a ‘stunt’ idea (like Swift’s Lilliput and Brobdingnag) is only good for a short use. I never showed more discretion, I believe, than in cutting that book short and never writing a sequel. The very fact that people ask for more proves it was the right length.

As to the reward for printed work (apart from money) one’s first good reviews are v. sweet-perhaps dangerously so–and fame has one really solid good about it in so far as it makes some strangers approach you with a friendliness they would not have felt otherwise. It may even win you their prayers (as I hope I have yours: you certainly have mine). The rest is all in the order of those things wh. it is painful to miss but not really v. nice to get. (It is painful not to be able to scratch a place in the middle of one’s back, yet scratching doesn’t rank v. high among our pleasures).

We are both well, thanks and go to Ireland in August. It is on the whole a cold and wet summer here. This last week it has been more like what we usually get in April: alternate sun and showers with high winds. As the man rightly said, ‘All weathers have their own beauty: if only people wd. enjoy that instead of always comparing it with some other weather.’ I hope Charles (and the play) will grow in goodness, intelligence, wit, and kindness.

All blessings. Love from both.

C. S. Lewis

TO ROGER LANCELYN GREEN (BOD):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 16/53

My dear Roger

Hail to the young Richard.¹⁵⁷ Give June my warmest love and congratulations.

Look: I think I must abandon the idea of an expedition on my way back from Ireland, for this year. It is becoming clear that I shan’t finish the proofs and horrible bibliography of my OHEL volume before we sail on Aug. 11th. That being so, every day between our return and the beginning of Michaelmas term becomes precious as gold: for if the job once drags on into another term, I don’t know what will become of me. Anyway, the jus trium liberorum¹⁵⁸ will be keeping you pretty busy. Do you know why liberi means both ‘freemen’ & ‘children’? Think it over and see if your historical imagination can solve the problem.

Yours

Jack

TO GEORGE SAYER(W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 17/53

My dear George

It is I who shd. be shamed for I wrote asking you both to come & see Comus at Ludlow: but as I sent the letter to an address in U.S.A. you naturally never answered!

Thanks, George, for your prayers: I never doubted that I had them, as you both have mine. The catarrh phase of the sinus is quite gone: the pain remains, but never at night (which is a great mercy) and for a decreasing number of hours daily. And thanks also for the invitation. But we’ll be in Ireland in Aug. We were hoping you’d come to us for some days after Sept 15. Can this be managed: any time between then and your term?

I’m damned with doing Bibliographies for my OHEL vol. How goes The Isle of the Undead?¹⁵⁹ All love.

Yours ever

Jack

TO MRS JOHNSON (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 17/53

Dear Mrs. Johnson

There are many interesting points in your letter of June 8. I’m v. glad you’ve seen that Christianity is as hard as nails: i.e. hard and tender at the same time. It’s the blend that does it: neither quality wd. be any good without the other. You needn’t worry about not feeling brave. Our Lord didn’t–see the scene in Gethsemane.

How thankful I am that when God became Man He did not choose to become a man of iron nerves: that wd. not have helped weaklings like you and me nearly so much. Especially don’t worry (you may of course pray) about being brave over merely possible evils in the future. In the old battles it was usually the reserve, who had to watch the carnage, not the troops who were in it, whose nerve broke first. Similarly I think you in America feel much more anxiety about atomic bombs than we do: because you are further from the danger. If and when a horror turns up, you will then be given Grace to help you. I don’t think one is usually given it in advance. ‘Give us our daily bread’¹⁶⁰ (not an annuity for life) applies to spiritual gifts too: the little daily support for the daily trial. Life has to be taken day by day & hour by hour.

The writer you quote (‘in all those turning lights’) was very good at the stage at wh. you met him: now, as is plain, you’ve got beyond him. Poor boob!-he thought his mind was his own! Never his own until he makes it Christ’s: up till then merely a result of heredity, environment, and the state of his digestion. I become my own only when I give myself to Another.

‘Does God seem real to me?’ It varies: just as lots of other things I firmly believe in (my own death, the solar system) feel more or less real at different times. I have dreamed dreams but not seen visions:¹⁶¹ but don’t think all that matters a hoot. And the saints say that visions are unimportant.¹⁶² If Our Lord did seem to appear to you at your prayer (bodily) what, after all, could you do but go on with your prayers? How cd. you know that it was not an hallucination?

You’ve got the Coronation right too: especially a sacrificial, even a tragic rite. And a symbol: for we (Man) have had laid on us the heavy crown of being lords of this planet, and the same contract between the frail, tiny person–the huge ritual goes for us all.

Did England, collectively, spend much on it? I shd. have thought most of the money was spent in England, transferred from one pocket to another. (Never forget that these personifications ‘England does this’ ‘America does that’ are only figures of speech: one has to figure out what they really mean).

No, no, I’m not committed to a real belief in Arthur, Merlin etc: all that comes in a story.¹⁶³ I haven’t the faintest idea whether there was a real Grail or not. Of course I believe that people are still healed by faith: whether this has happened in any particular case, one can’t of course say without getting a real-Doctor-who-is-also-a-real-Christian to go through the whole case-history.

All you say about your little girl is delightful. Bless her and all of you.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS FRANK JONES (W): TS

REF.18/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

17th July 1953.

My dear Mrs. Jones,

Many thanks for your interesting letter. To us, the high light naturally is the news that you plan to visit this benighted country; and you shall indeed have two words with my brother and myself–and a lot more than two I hope; indeed we are optimistic enough to imagine that you might come and stay with us for a day or two in our suburban residence, and see how bachelors live. It would make a little break from the routine of hotels, and especially of English hotels. We shall be interested to hear your plans when the time draws nearer.

Oddly enough, we too have been seeing a college reunion, and mainly American at that, here in Oxford. The University had the bright idea of celebrating the Cecil Rhodes centenary by inviting all old Rhodes Scholars to visit Oxford, live in their old College rooms, and attend sundry dinner parties and so forth; there was a large gathering, and they all seemed to enjoy it.¹⁶⁴

I am glad the film interested you; my brother saw the actual coronation on the television, and was very much impressed with it: especially with the real devout piety shown by the Queen, who obviously took her vows very seriously. Like you, we have’nt got a set, and don’t propose to get one; it is I think a very bad habit to develop. People who have sets seem to do nothing but go into a huddle over them every evening of their lives, instead of being out walking, or in their gardens. And of course, like all things which begin as luxuries, they end up by being necessities; an unofficial cost of living survey was recently held in our midland manufacturing districts, and quite a large percentage of the working class interviewed complained that if prices did’nt come down, or wages go up, they would not be able to maintain their payments on their television sets–which have now become part of the worker’s basic standard of living. Just think of men drawing perhaps $40 a week, considering an article costing–cash down–perhaps $250, a necessity!

I wish next time you send me a parcel, you would fill it with some of your summer weather; here for the past week and more, it has been just like April–patches of sunshine between heavy showers, and the morning temperature 54-58. No sign of any improvement today, and I have to go up to town this afternoon for a garden party. You would think I would have more sense at my time of life, would’nt you?

With all best wishes to you both, and to Freiherr von und zu Brock von Grabenbruch,

yours sincerely,

C. S. Lewis¹⁶⁵

TO MARY VAN DEUSEN (W):

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

July 23rd 53

Dear Mrs. Van Deusen

I think your decision ‘a rule of life, without membership’ is a good one. It is a great joy to be able to ‘feel’ God’s love as a reality, and one must give thanks for it and use it. But you must be prepared for the feeling dying away again, for feelings are by nature impermanent. The great thing is to continue to believe when the feeling is absent: & these periods do quite as much for one as those when the feeling is present.

It sounds to me as if Genia had a pretty good husband on the whole. So much matrimonial misery comes to me in my mail that I feel those whose partner has no worse fault than being stupider than themselves may be said to have drawn a prize! It hardly amounts to a Problem. I take it that in every marriage natural love sooner or later, in a high or a low degree, comes up against difficulties (if only the difficulty that the original state of ‘being in love’ dies a natural death) which force it either to turn into dislike or else to turn into Christian charity. For all our natural feelings are, not resting places, but points d’appui, springboards. One has to go on from there, or fall back from there. The merely human pleasure in being loved must either go bad or become the divine joy of loving. But no doubt Genia knows all this. It’s all quite in the ordinary run of Christian life. See I Peter iv, 12 ‘Think it not strange etc.’¹⁶⁶

I don’t remember any question of Genia’s to wh. the answer wd. have been ‘Read my children’s books’! I have to guard against making my letters into advertisements, you know!

The sinusitis is much better, if not quite gone. You are all in my prayers: and now I must go to my work.

Yours ever

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen etc.

Aug. 1st [1953]

Dear Mrs. Shelburne–

Thanks for yours of the 16th. Our climatic troubles are just the opposite of yours; one of the coldest and wettest summers I remember. But I’d dislike your heat v. much more than our cold.

I am so glad you gave me an account of the lovely priest. How little people know who think that holiness is dull. When one meets the real thing (and perhaps, like you, I have met it only once) it is irresistible.¹⁶⁷

If even 10% of the world’s population had it, would not the whole world be converted and happy before a year’s end?

Yes, I too think there is lots to be said for being no longer young: and I do most heartily agree that it is just as well to be past the age when one expects or desires to attract the other sex. It’s natural enough in our species, as in others, that the young birds shd. show off their plumage–in the mating season. But the trouble in the modern world is that there’s a tendency to rush all the birds on to that age as soon as possible and then keep them there as late as possible, thus losing all the real value of the other parts of life in a senseless, pitiful attempt to prolong what, after all, is neither its wisest, its happiest, or most innocent period. I suspect merely commercial motives are behind it all: for it is at the showing-off age that birds of both sexes have least sales-resistance!

Naturally I can have no views on a choice between Richmond and Washington any more than on one between Omsk and Teheran! But of course you shall have my prayers.

Sorry to hear about the fall: they’re nasty things. I must stop now, for I’m dead tired from standing at catalogue-shelves in a library all morning verifying titles of books & editions. I think, like the Irishman in the story ‘I’d sooner walk 10 miles than stand one’. I go to Ireland on the 11th so don’t be surprised if you don’t hear from me again till the end of September. All blessings.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO LAURENCE HARWOOD (BOD):

Magdalen

Aug 2nd 53

My dear Lawrence–

I was sorry to hear from Owen Barfield that you have taken a nasty knock over History Prelim.¹⁶⁸ Sorry, because I know it can’t be much fun for you: not because I think the thing is necessarily a major disaster. We are now so used to the examination system that we hardly remember how very recent it is and how hotly it was opposed by some quite sincere people. Trollope (no fool) was utterly sceptical about its value: and I myself, tho’ a don, sometimes wonder how many of the useful, or even the great, men of the past wd. have survived it. It doesn’t test all qualities by any means: not even all qualities needed in an academic life. And anyway, what a small part of life that is. And if you are not suited for that, it is well to have been pushed forcibly out of it at an earlier rather than a later stage. It is much worse to waste three or more years getting a Fourth or a Pass. You can now cut your losses and start on something else.

At the moment, I can well imagine, everything seems in ruins. That is an illusion. The world is full of capable and useful people who began life by ploughing in exams. You will laugh at this contre temps¹⁶⁹ some day. Of course it wd. be disastrous to go to the other extreme and conclude that one was a genius because one had failed in a prelim-as if a horse imagined it must be a Derby winner because it couldn’t be taught to pull a four-wheeler!-but I don’t expect that is the extreme to which you are temperamentally inclined.

Are you in any danger of seeking consolation in Resentment? I have no reason to suppose you are, but it is a favourite desire of the human mind (certainly of my mind!) and one wants to be on one’s guard against it. And that is about the only way in which an early failure like this can become a real permanent injury. A belief that one has been misused, a tendency ever after to snap and snarl at ‘the system’-that, I think, makes a man always a bore, usually an ass, sometimes a villain. So don’t think either that you are no good or that you are a Victim. Write the whole thing off and get on.

You may reply ‘It’s easy talking.’ I shan’t blame you if you do. I remember only too well what a hopeless oyster to be opened the world seemed at your age. I would have given a good deal to anyone who cd. have assured me that I ever wd. be able to persuade anyone to pay me a living wage for anything I cd. do. Life consisted of applying for jobs which other people got, writing books that no one wd. publish, and giving lectures wh. no one attended. It all looks perfectly hopeless. Yet the vast majority of us manage to get in somewhere and shake down somehow in the end.

You are now going through what most people (at any rate most of the people I know) find in retrospect to have been the most unpleasant period of their lives. But it won’t last: the road usually improves later. I think life is rather like a lumpy bed in a bad hotel. At first you can’t imagine how you can lie on it, much less sleep in it. But presently one finds the right position and finally one is snoring away. By the time one is called it seems a v. good bed and one is loth to leave it.

This is a devilish stodgy letter. There’s no need to bother answering it. I go to Ireland on the 11th. Give my love to all & thank Sylvia for my bathing suit.

Yours

C. S. Lewis

TO MRS EMILY MCLAY (W): ¹⁷⁰

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

Aug 3rd 1953

Dear Mrs. McLay

I take it as a first principle that we must not interpret any one part of Scripture so that it contradicts other parts: and specially we must not use an Apostle’s teaching to contradict that of Our Lord. Whatever St Paul may have meant, we must not reject the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt. XXV. 30-46). There, you see there is nothing about Predestination or even about Faith–all depends on works. But how this is to be reconciled with St Paul’s teaching, or with other sayings of Our Lord, I frankly confess I don’t know. Even St Peter you know admits that he was stumped by the Pauline epistles (II Peter III. 16-17).¹⁷¹

What I think is this. Everyone looking back on his own conversion must feel–and I am sure the feeling is in some sense true-‘It is not 7 who have done this. I did not choose Christ: He chose me. It is all free grace, wh. I have done nothing to earn.’ That is the Pauline account: and I am sure it is the only true account of every conversion from the inside. Very well. It then seems to us logical & natural to turn this personal experience into a general rule ‘All conversions depend on God’s choice’.

But this I believe is exactly what we must not do: for generalisations are legitimate only when we are dealing with matters to which our faculties are adequate. Here, we are not. How our individual experiences are in reality consistent with (a) Our idea of Divine justice, (b) The parable I’ve just quoted & lots of other passages, we don’t & can’t know: what is clear is that we can’t find a consistent formula. I think we must take a leaf out of the scientists’ book. They are quite familiar with the fact that, for example, Light has to be regarded both as a wave in the ether and as a stream of particles. No one can make these two views consistent. Of course reality must be self-consistent: but till (if ever) we can see the consistency it is better to hold two inconsistent views than to ignore one side of the evidence.

The real inter-relation between God’s omnipotence and Man’s freedom is something we can’t find out. Looking at the Sheep & the Goats every man can be quite sure that every kind act he does will be accepted by Christ. Yet, equally, we all do feel sure that all the good in us comes from Grace. We have to leave it at that. I find the best plan is to take the Calvinist view of my own virtues and other people’s vices: and the other view of my own vices and other people’s virtues.¹⁷² But tho’ there is much to be puzzled about, there is nothing to be worried about. It is plain from Scripture that, in whatever sense the Pauline doctrine is true, it is not true in any sense which excludes its (apparent) opposite.

You know what Luther said: ‘Do you doubt if you are chosen? Then say your prayers and you may conclude that you are.’¹⁷³

Yrs. Sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO GEOFFREY BLES (BOD): TS

365/53.

Magdalen College,

Oxford.

5th August 1953.

My dear Bles,

I know naught of these people: but perhaps it will do if I ask you to send them Mere Christianity and Miracles. A Portuguese American Presbyterian must be a most fearful wildfowl!-or am I mistranslating.¹⁷⁴

Kind regards to both.

Yours,¹⁷⁵

TO MRS EMILY MCIAY (W):

Magdalen

Aug 8th 1953

Dear Mrs. McLay

Your experience in listening to those philosophers gives you the technique one needs for dealing with the dark places in the Bible. When one of the philosophers, one whom you know on other grounds to be a sane and decent man, said something you didn’t understand, you did not at once conclude that he had gone off his head. You assumed you’d missed the point. Same here. The two things one must NOT do are (a) To believe, on the strength of Scripture or on any other evidence, that God is in any way evil. (In Him is no darkness at all.)¹⁷⁶ (b) To wipe off the slate any passage which seems to show that He is.¹⁷⁷ Behind that apparently shocking passage, be sure, there lurks some great truth which you don’t understand. If one ever does come to understand it, one will see that [He] is good and just and gracious in ways we never dreamed of. Till then, it must be just left on one side.

But why are baffling passages left in at all? Oh, because God speaks not only for us little ones but for the great sages and mystics who experience what we only read about, and to whom all the words have therefore different (richer) contents. Would not a revelation which contained nothing that you and I did not understand, be for that v. reason rather suspect? To a child it wd. seem a contradiction to say both that his parents made him and that God made him, yet we see both can be true.

Yours sincerely

C. S. Lewis

TO DON GIOVANNI CALABRIA (V):

Collegium Stae Mariae

Magdalenae apud

Oxonienses

Aug. x. MCMLIII

Dilectissime Pater–

Accepi litteras tuas V^to Augusti datas. Expecto cum gratiarum actione opuscula, specimen artis vestrae typographicae: quae tamen non videbo nisi post V hebdomadas quia pertransibo eras (si Deo placuerit) in Hiberniam; incunabula mea et dulcissimum refugium, quoad amoenitatem locorum et caeli temperiem quamquam rixis et odiis et saepe civilibus armis dissentientium religionum atrocissimam. Ibi sane et vestri et nostri ‘ignorant quo spiritu ducantur’: carentiam caritatis pro zelo accipiunt et reciprocam ignorantiam pro orthodoxia. Puto, fere omnia facinora quae invicem perpetraverunt Christiani ex illo evenerunt quod religio miscetur cum re politica. Diabolus enim supra omnes ceteras humanas vitae partes rem politicam sibi quasi propriam–quasi arcem suae potestatis–vindicat. Nos tamen pro viribus (sc. quisque) suis mutuis orationibus incessanter laboremus pro caritate quae ‘multitudinem peccatorum tegit.’ Vale, sodes et pater.

C. S. Lewis

The College of St Mary Magdalen

Oxford

Aug. 10 1953

Dearest Father–

I have received your letter dated the 5th August. I await with gratitude the pamphlets–a specimen of your people’s printing skill: which however I shall not see for 5 weeks because tomorrow I am crossing over (if God so have pleased) to Ireland: my birthplace and dearest refuge so far as charm of landscape goes, and temperate climate, although most dreadful because of the strife, hatred and often civil war between dissenting faiths.

There indeed both yours and ours ‘know not by what Spirit they are led’.¹⁷⁸ They take lack of charity for zeal and mutual ignorance for orthodoxy.

I think almost all the crimes which Christians have perpetrated against each other arise from this, that religion is confused with politics. For, above all other spheres of human life, the Devil claims politics for his own, as almost the citadel of his power. Let us, however, with mutual prayers pray with all our power for that charity which ‘covers a multitude of sins’.¹⁷⁹ Farewell, comrade and father.

C. S. Lewis

TO MARY WILLIS SHELBURNE (W):

Magdalen

Aug. 10th 53

Dear Mrs. Shelburne

I have just got your letter of the 6th. Oh I do so sympathise with you: job-hunting, even in youth, is a heartbreaking affair and to have to go back to it now must be simply–I was going to say ‘simply Hell’, but no one who is engaged in prayer and humility, as you are, can be there, so I’d better say ‘Purgatory’. (We have as a matter of fact good authorities for calling it something other than Purgatory. We are told that even those tribulations wh. fall upon us by necessity, if embraced for Christ’s sake, become as meritorious as voluntary sufferings and every missed meal can be converted into a fast if taken in the right way).¹⁸⁰

I suppose–tho’ the person who is not suffering feels shy about saying it to the person who is-that it is good for us to be cured of the illusion of ‘independence’. For of course independence, the state of being indebted to no one, is eternally impossible. Who, after all, is more totally dependent than what we call the man ‘of independent means’. Every shirt he wears is made by other people out of other organisms and the only difference between him and us is that even the money whereby he pays for it was earned by other people. Of course you ought to be dependent on your daughter and son-in-law. Support of parents is a most ancient & universally acknowledged duty. And if you come to find yourself dependent on anyone else you mustn’t mind. But I am very, very sorry. I’m a panic-y person about money myself (which is a most shameful confession and a thing dead against Our Lord’s words)¹⁸¹ and poverty frightens me more than anything else except large spiders and the tops of cliffs: one is sometimes even tempted to say that if God wanted us to live like the lilies of the field He might have given us an organism more like theirs! But of course He is right. And when you meet anyone who does live like the lilies, one sees that He is.

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