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  18.I do not know which English publishers Lewis sent ‘The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’ to. It was first published in 20th Century: An Australian Quarterly Review, vol. III, no. 3 (1949), pp. 5–12. At the end of the essay Lewis added this postscript: ‘One last word. You may ask why I send this to an Australian periodical. The reason is simple and perhaps worth recording: I can get no hearing for it in England.’ The essay found a serious hearing in Australia and two criminologists, Norval Morris and Donald Buckle, published ‘A Reply to C. S. Lewis’ in 20th Century, vol. VI, no. 2 (1952). After this Lewis’s essay and Drs Morris’ and Buckle’s ‘Reply’ were reprinted in the Australian law journal Res Judicatae, vol. VI (June 1953), pp. 224–30 and pp. 231–7. Then came J. J. C. Smart’s ‘Comment: The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’ in Res Judicatae, vol. VI (February 1954). This caused Lewis to write ‘On Punishment: A Reply’ – a reply to all three men – which was published in Res Judicatae, vol. VI (August 1954), pp. 519–23. Later, when Lewis allowed the English journal. The Churchman, to reprint his original essay in their issue of April–June 1959, he removed the postscript. It has since been reprinted in a number of American collections of essays on capital punishment and related issues. Of all Lewis’s essays this is one of the most respected and certainly the most controversial. This book contains the original essay as well as Lewis’s ‘On Punishment: A Reply’.

  19.‘The Pains of Animals: A Problem in Theology’ originally appeared in The Month, vol. CLXXXIX (February 1950), pp. 95–104. I am very grateful to Miss M. F. Matthews for permission to include the late Dr C. E. M. Joad’s part of this good-natured dispute.

  20.‘Is Theism Important? A Reply’ comes from The Socratic Digest, no. 5 (1952), pp. 48–51.

  21.‘Xmas and Christmas: A Lost Chapter from Herodotus’ was first published in Time and Tide, vol. XXXV (4 December 1954), p. 1607.

  22.‘Prudery and Philology’ is reprinted from The Spectator, vol. CXCIV (21 January 1955), pp. 63–4.

  23.‘Is History Bunk?’ is reprinted from The Cambridge Review, vol. LXXVIII (1 June 1957), pp. 647, 649.

  24.‘Willing Slaves of the Welfare State’ was originally published in The Observer (20 July 1958), p. 6.

  Walter Hooper

  Oxford

  FOOTNOTES

  3. First and Second Things

  1This is found in R.L. Stevenson’s ‘Faith, Half-Faith, and No Faith’, first published in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde with other Fables (London, 1896).

  2One converses better when one does not say ‘Let us converse’.

  4. Equality

  1John Milton, Paradise Lost (1667), Book IV, line 740.

  2Naomi Mitchison, The Home and a Changing Civilisation (London, 1934), Chapter 1, pp. 49–50.

  6. ‘Horrid Red Things’

  1Robert Bridges, The Testament of Beauty, Book I, line 57.

  7. Democratic Education

  1The Order of the Garter, instituted by King Edward III in 1344, is the highest order of knighthood. Lewis had in mind the comment made by Lord Melbourne (1779–1848) about the Order, ‘I like the Garter, there is no damned merit in it.’

  2Richard Porson (1759–1808), son of the parish clerk at East Ruston, near North Walsham, showed extraordinary memory when a boy, and by the help of various protectors he was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. In 1792 he became Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge.

  8. A Dream

  1Women’s Auxiliary Air Force.

  2The Local Defence Volunteers were organized in May 1940 for men between the ages of 17 and 65. Their purpose was to deal with German parachutists. The name was changed to the Home Guard in December 1940, and conscription began in 1941.

  9. Is English Doomed?

  1The title of ‘The Norwood Report’, so called after its chairman Sir Cyril Norwood, is Curriculum and Examinations in Secondary Schools: Report of the Committee of the Secondary School Examinations Council Appointed by the President of the Board of Education in 1941 (1943). See also Lewis’s essay ‘The Partheon and the Optative’ in his Of This and Other Worlds, ed. Walter Hooper (1982). The American title of this book is On Stories and Other Essays on Literature (1982).

  2Sir Launcelot of the Arthurian Romances; Baron Bradwardine in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814); Terence Mulvaney is one of the three privates in Rudyard Kipling’s Soldiers Three (1888).

  3Sir Philip Sidney, The Arcadia (1590), Book V.

  12. Christian Apologetics

  1This paper was read to an assembly of Anglican priests and youth leaders of the Church in Wales at Carmarthen during Easter 1945.

  2The source of this is, I believe, Jeremiah 6:16, ‘State super vias et videte, et interrogate de semitis antiquis quae sit via bona, et ambulate in ea’, which is translated, ‘Stand ye in the ways, and see, and ask for the old paths, where is the good way, and walk therein’.

  3I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts. Virgil, Aeneid, Bk. II, line 49.

  4Sir William H. Beveridge, Social Insurance and Allied Services, Command Paper 6404, Parliamentary Session 1942–3 (London: H. M. Stationery Office, 1942). The ‘Beveridge Report’ is a plan for the present Social Security system in Britain.

  5The metuentes or ‘god-fearers’ were a class of Gentiles who worshipped God without submitting to circumcision and the other ceremonial obligations of the Jewish Law. See Psalm 118:4 and Acts 10:2.

  6The first quotation is from the prayer for the ‘Whole state of Christ’s Church’ in the service of Holy Communion, Prayer Book (1662). The second is the revised form of that same phrase as found in the 1928 Prayer Book.

  7A phrase which occurs in the prayer of ‘Thanksgiving’ at the end of the service of Holy Communion in the Book of Common Prayer (1662).

  8Which means ‘spirit’, as in 1 Corinthians 14:12.

  9Not all things can we all do. Virgil, Eclogues, Bk. VIII, line 63.

  10Either God or a bad man.

  11Article XVIII in the Prayer Book: Of obtaining eternal Salvation only by the Name of Christ, which says ‘They also are to be had accursed that presume to say, That every man shall be saved by the Law or Sect which he professeth, so that he be diligent to frame his life according to that Law, and the light of Nature. For holy Scripture doth set out unto us only the Name of Jesus Christ, whereby men must be saved.’

  12Without outraging reverence.

  13Let us pray for each other.

  13. The Decline of Religion

  1After there came to be a number of non-Anglican students in the Oxford colleges, those students who did not wish to attend the morning chapel service were required to report to the Dean five or ten minutes before the service and have their names put on his roll-call. Thus the ‘rollers’ who did not go to chapel had to be up before those who did go. Neither chapel service nor the Dean’s roll-call is compulsory now.

  2F. H. Bradley (1846–1924) was a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, and the author of Appearance and Reality (London, 1893). Major C. H. Douglas, a socio-economist, wrote, among other works, Social Credit (London, 1933). The Vorticists were a school of artists of the 1920s.

  3No one, practically. As far as I can discover, Pogo, or the Pogo-stick, which was invented in 1922, is a stilt with a spring on which the player jumps about.

  4Childermass is by P. Wyndham Lewis (London, 1928).

  14. Religion Without Dogma?

  1This paper was originally read to the Oxford Socratic Club on 20 May 1946, in answer to a paper of Professor H. H. Price on ‘The Grounds of Modern Agnosticism’ on 20 October 1944. Both were later published in the Phoenix Quarterly (Autumn 1946). Though Lewis’s paper was afterwards reprinted in The Socratic Digest (1948), it is obvious from the fact that many errors which appear in the Socratic version were corrected in the Quarterly version, that the Quarterly version represents Lewis’s final revision. Besides this, I have incorporated in the text given here all the marginal emendations and additions which Lewis made in his own copy of the
Phoenix Quarterly.

  2H. H. Price, ‘The Grounds of Modern Agnosticism’, Phoenix Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 1 (Autumn 1946), p. 25.

  3‘Resolution’, The Complete Poems of Dr Henry More, ed. Alexander B. Grosart (Edinburgh 1878), line 117, p. 176.

  4A Sicilian writer (c. 315 BC) who developed the theory that the ancient beliefs about the gods originated from the elaboration of traditions of actual historical persons.

  5James George Frazer, The Golden Bough (London, 1922).

  6Price, op. cit., p. 20.

  7Ibid.

  8Ibid.

  9In order that nothing should be lost to the reader, I have included between square brackets those portions from the Socratic version of this paper which Lewis omitted in revising it for the Phoenix Quarterly. See footnote.

  10(London, 1945).

  11Small inclination. De Rerum Natura, Bk. II, line 292.

  12‘Spoken and Written English’, The Collected Papers of Henry Bradley, ed. Robert Bridges (Oxford, 1928), pp. 168–93.

  13Akhenaton (Amenhotep IV), king of Egypt, who came to the throne about 1375 BC and introduced a new religion, in which the sun-god Ra (designated as ‘Aton’) superseded Amon.

  14Roman emperor AD 361–3, who was brought up compulsorily as a Christian, but who on attaining the throne proclaimed himself a pagan. He made a great effort to revive the worship of the old gods.

  15Edward Herbert (1583–1648). He is known as the ‘Father of Deism’, for he maintained that among the ‘common notions’ apprehended by instinct are the existence of God, the duty of worship and repentance, and future rewards and punishment. This ‘natural religion’, he maintained, had been vitiated by superstition and dogma.

  16Annie Besant (1847–1933) was an ardent supporter of Liberal causes and became a member of the Theosophical Society in 1889.

  17Martin Tupper (1810–89) is probably best known for his Proverbial Philosophy – commonplace maxims and reflections couched in a rhythmical form.

  18Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Epilog zu Schillers Glocke, 1. 32. ‘Das Gemeine’ means something like ‘that which dominates us all’.

  19Euripides, Bacchae, line 74.

  15. Vivisection

  1‘Vivisection as a Sign of the Times’, The Works of Lewis Carroll. ed. Roger Lancelyn Green (London, 1965), pp. 1089–92. See also ‘Some Popular Fallacies about Vivisection’, ibid., pp. 1092–100.

  2Shakespeare, Cymbeline, I, v, 19–20.

  3Ibid., 23.

  4Johnson on Shakespeare: Essays and Notes Selected and Set Forth with an Introduction by Sir Walter Raleigh (London, 1908), p. 181.

  16. Modern Translations of the Bible

  1This essay was originally published as an Introduction to J. B. Phillips’ Letters to Young Churches: A Translation of the New Testament Epistles (London, 1947).

  2James Moffatt (1870–1944), whose translation of the New Testament appeared in 1913, his translation of the Old Testament in 1924, the whole being revised in 1935.

  3Ronald A. Knox (1888–1957) published a translation of the New Testament in 1945, and a translation of the Old Testament in 1949.

  18. The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment

  1We must believe the expert in his own field.

  2To cause terror.

  3The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. James Blanton Wharey, second edition revised by Roger Sharrock, Oxford English Texts (Oxford, 1960), Part I, p. 70.

  4‘John Ball’s Letter to the Peasants of Essex, 1381’, lines 11–12, found in Fourteenth Century Verse and Prose, ed. Kenneth Sisam (Oxford, 1921), p. 161.

  5‘Comment: The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment’, Res Judicatae, Vol. VI (February 1954), pp. 368–71.

  6‘Reply to C.S. Lewis’, Res Judicatae, Vol. VI (June 1953), pp. 231–7.

  7See the penultimate paragraph of Professor Smart’s article.

  8The safety of the people is the highest law. Cicero, De Legibus, Book III, part iii, section 8.

  9I am not sure whether for Professor Smart the ‘community’ means the nation or the species. If the former, difficulties arise about international morality, in discussing which I think Professor Smart would have to come to the species sooner or later.

  10This is really the same objection as that which I would make to Aristotle’s theory of slavery (Politics 1254A et seq.). We can all recognize the ‘natural’ slaves (I am perhaps one myself) but where are the ‘natural’ masters?

  11See also Lewis: The Abolition of Man (London, 1943), especially the Appendix.

  19. The Pains of Animals

  1In his book, The Problem of Pain, one of the questions Lewis addressed himself to was how to account for the occurrence of pain in a universe which is the creation of an all-good God, and in creatures who are not morally sinful. His chapter on ‘Animal Pain’ provoked a counter-inquiry from the late C. E. M. Joad, who was Head of the Department of Philosophy in the University of London. The result was this controversy, first published in The Month.

  2The Problem of Pain (London, 1940), ch. 9, p. 120.

  3Ibid., pp. 120–1.

  4Ibid., p. 121.

  5Ibid., p. 127.

  6Ibid., p. 128.

  7Ibid., pp. 122–3.

  8G. K. Chesterton, ‘A Hymn’, line 11. The first line begins ‘O God of earth and altar’.

  9For the sake of argument.

  10The Problem of Pain, p. 128.

  11Lady Julian of Norwich, Sixteenth Revelations of Divine Love, ch. 29.

  12Beauty so ancient and so new, St Augustine, Confessions, Bk. X, ch. 27.

  13‘Despair’, 19, 106.

  20. Is Theism Important?

  1This is a reply to a paper Professor H. H. Price read to the Oxford Socratic Club. Professor Price’s paper was published under the same title in The Socratic Digest, No. 5 (1952), pp. 39–47, and Lewis’s answer, printed here, was originally published in the same periodical.

  2This is briefly summed up in René Descartes, Discours de la Méthode, Part iv, in which he says ‘I think, therefore I am’.

  3Faith seeking understanding.

  4Rudolph Otto, The Idea of the Holy, trans. John W. Harvey (London, 1923).

  5Being of beings.

  23. Is History Bunk?

  1John Barbour (1316?–1395) composed his poem The Bruce, celebrating the war of independence and deeds of King Robert and James Douglas, about 1375.

  2Metaphysics, 982b.

  3Cf. Poetics, 1451b.

  4H. A. Mason, ‘Churchill’s Satire’, a review of The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. Douglas Grant (1956) in The Cambridge Review, vol. LXXVIII (11 May 1957), p. 571.

  24. Willing Slaves of the Welfare State

  1From the French Revolution to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, it was generally assumed that progress in human affairs was not only possible but inevitable. Since then two terrible wars and the discovery of the hydrogen bomb have made men question this confident assumption. The Observer invited five well-known writers to give their answers to the following questions: ‘Is man progressing today?’ ‘Is progress even possible?’ This second article in the series is a reply to the opening article by C. P. Snow, ‘Man in Society’, The Observer (13 July 1958).

  2One essay in J. B. S. Haldane’s Possible Worlds and Other Essays (London, 1927). See also ‘The Last Judgement’ in the same book.

  3In Shakespeare’s King Lear.

  4Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, Politique tirée des propres paroles de l’Écriture-Sainte (Paris, 1709).

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Clive Staples Lewis (1898–1963) was one of the intellectual giants of the twentieth century and arguably the most influential writer of his day. He was a Fellow and Tutor in English literature at Oxford University until 1954, when he was unanimously elected to the Chair of Medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge University, a position he held until his retirement. He wrote more than 30 books, allowing him to reach a vast audience, and his works continue to attract thousands of new readers every y
ear. His most distinguished and popular accomplishments include The Chronicles of Narnia, The Cosmic Trilogy, The Four Loves, The Screwtape Letters and Mere Christianity.

  OTHER BOOKS BY C.S. LEWIS

  Christian Reflections

  Mere Christianity

  Miracles

  Surprised by Joy

  The Four Loves

  The Great Divorce

  The Problem of Pain

  The Screwtape Letters

  The Weight of Glory