Screwtape--Chapter Eight

In Lifegroup we've been reading through/discussing C.S.Lewis' "The Screwtape Letters"

Every time I read this book, I become more and more thankful for the insight given to Lewis. Chapter eight is slowly becoming my favorite. Here are a few excerpts (read: most of the chapter) for you.

"Humans are amphibians--half spirit and half animal..As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions and imaginations are in continual change, for
to be in time means to change."

"As long as the human lives on earth, periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty."

"One must face the fact that all the talk about His (God) love for men, and His service being perfect freedom, is not, mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself--a creature whose life...will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely confirm to His."

"We want to suck in, He (God) wants to give out. We are empty and would be filled; He is full and flows over. Our war aim is a world in which Our Father Below has drawn all other beings into himself: the Enemy (God) wants a world full of beings united to Him but still distinct."

"He cannot ravish. He can only woo...the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves."

"Hence, the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best"

"Do not be deceived, our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy's (God) will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him (God) seems to have vanished, and ask why he has been forsaken, and still obeys."