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Copywork
About This Passage
This sentence supplies the premise behind the whole chapter and behind Lewis's argument from desire: because people are made for an eternal world, no earthly thing can ever fully satisfy them, and their restlessness is a built-in safeguard against settling for less. Copying it fixes the claim that the soul's homesickness is not a flaw but a design.
The truth is that the Enemy, having oddly destined these mere animals to life in His own eternal world, has guarded them pretty effectively from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else.
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Reconstruct the argument of Screwtape's twenty-eighth letter to Wormwood in sequence — the rebuke for hoping the man dies, the surprising resolve to keep him alive so 'time itself' becomes the devils' ally, the strategy of wearing a soul down by attrition, the admission of an 'appetite for Heaven' that keeps undoing their work, the countermeasure of promising an earthly paradise, and the reframing of death as a gate. Then state the single corruption you take to organize the letter, and weigh whether Hell's deepest danger is dramatic temptation or the patience of time.
Discussion Questions
- Screwtape concedes that the Enemy has 'guarded' people 'from the danger of feeling at home anywhere else,' so that even 'the sight of a horizon' keeps 'blowing our whole structure away.' Does the persistence of a longing that no earthly thing can satisfy point to a real object beyond this world, or could it be a natural restlessness with no destination — and what in the letter to Wormwood helps you decide, and why?
- In an earlier letter the devils taught people to picture the Future as 'a promised land which favoured heroes attain'; here they harness the 'appetite for Heaven' by promising that 'earth can be turned into Heaven... by politics or eugenics or science.' Reading the two letters together, why are secular utopian hopes such effective tools for Hell, and how do they work by counterfeiting, rather than denying, the human longing for an eternal good? Use details from this letter and the earlier one to Wormwood, and explain why your reading is stronger.
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Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Set apart in advance for a particular end or fate.
Item 2
Undoing something thread by thread; gradually loosening apart.
Item 3
Wildly enthusiastic or ecstatic expressions of feeling.
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Critical Thinking
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