A Voice on the Wireless

“But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.”

— 1 Peter 3:15, KJV

Evacuees at the Kilns

When war came again in September 1939, Lewis was forty. He was too old to fight, and his wounds would have excused him anyway, but the war reached the Kilns at once. Within days a group of schoolgirls evacuated from London arrived to live there, and over the next years a succession of evacuee children passed through the house. Lewis, a bachelor who had very little to do with children and claimed not to like them, found that he rather enjoyed them. He also joined the Home Guard, and took his turn, every week or so, patrolling the streets of Oxford with a rifle in the small hours, which he described in letters as a mixture of boredom, cold and unexpectedly good conversation.

Warnie was recalled to the army and sent to France. He came back after the evacuation of the British army in 1940 and was retired again. The household settled down to rationing, blackout and anxiety, like every household in Britain.

The Problem of Pain

Before the war began, a publisher named Ashley Sampson had asked Lewis to write a short book on the problem of suffering for a series of popular Christian books. Lewis agreed, and wrote it during the first winter of the war, reading the chapters aloud to the Inklings as he went. The Problem of Pain was published in October 1940, and dedicated to them. It is a closely argued book, written for readers who wanted to know how a good and all-powerful God could allow the world to suffer as it did. In a country waiting to be bombed, there were a great many such readers. It sold well and was reprinted again and again, and it made Lewis’s name outside the university for the first time.

Screwtape

On a Sunday in July 1940, Lewis was sitting in Holy Trinity Church during the service when an idea came to him for a book. It would be a series of letters from an experienced devil to a junior devil, a nephew who was trying to tempt a young man in England away from God. Everything in it would be upside down: God would be the Enemy, and vice and despair the goal. Lewis wrote to Warnie about the idea that week.

The letters appeared one at a time in an Anglican weekly paper, The Guardian, from May to November 1941. The editor paid Lewis two pounds for each one. Lewis refused the money and had it sent instead to a fund for the widows of clergy. In February 1942 the letters were published as a book, The Screwtape Letters, dedicated to Tolkien. It was an immediate and enormous success. It was reprinted eight times in its first year, and it has never been out of print since. It is the book that first made Lewis famous on both sides of the Atlantic. Lewis himself found it a strain. It had come to him easily, but he later admitted that living for months inside the mind of a devil had been a dry and stifling experience, and he refused for years to write any more.

The BBC

Among the readers of The Problem of Pain was the Reverend James Welch, the director of religious broadcasting at the BBC. In February 1941 he wrote to Lewis asking whether he would give some talks on the radio. Lewis hesitated, then agreed. He was coached in the new art of broadcasting by a BBC producer, the Presbyterian minister Eric Fenn, who taught him to write for the ear: shorter sentences, plainer words, one idea at a time.

The first talk went out on Wednesday 6 August 1941, at a quarter to eight in the evening, for fifteen minutes. It was the beginning of four series of talks over the next three years. The first series asked whether there is any real standard of right and wrong, and what it might tell us about the universe. The second explained what Christians believe. The third was about Christian behaviour, and the fourth about the doctrine of God. Lewis spoke in a deep, unhurried, slightly gruff voice with no clerical solemnity at all. He sounded like an intelligent man talking sense across a kitchen table. Listeners all over the country, many of whom had never heard the faith explained without pious language, wrote to him in their hundreds.

Lewis did not like broadcasting, and he did not like the fame it brought him. He had to travel to London, often at night, through the blackout and the bombing, to speak live into a microphone. He was paid modestly. But he thought that the talks were a duty. The country was at war; many of its people did not know what the faith they were defending was; and he had been asked. The talks were published as three short books and, in 1952, gathered into one volume as Mere Christianity, which has led countless readers to faith.

The Royal Air Force

At about the same time, Lewis was invited by the chaplaincy of the Royal Air Force to speak to airmen at bases around the country. He gave his first talk at the RAF station at Abingdon, near Oxford, in the spring of 1941, and he went on giving them for several years, travelling to stations all over Britain during the university vacations. It was hard work. The audiences were made up of men who had been ordered to attend, many of them tired, sceptical or bored, and many of them knew that they would very likely be killed within months. Lewis felt that the first talks were failures. He was not used to audiences who had not chosen to hear him, and he found it difficult to speak to men whose education and experience were so different from his own.

He learned. He came to think of the RAF talks as a hard but invaluable school. He had to drop his learned allusions, translate every theological term into plain English, and take seriously the questions of men who had no time for anything that sounded like a sermon. It was, he thought, an exercise in humility, and it made him a better apologist.

The Weight of Glory

There were other invitations. On 8 June 1941 he preached at evensong in the university church of St Mary the Virgin, in Oxford, to a congregation that filled the church and spilled out into the street. The sermon was published as The Weight of Glory, and many readers think it the finest thing he ever wrote. In February 1943 he gave a series of lectures at the University of Durham that became The Abolition of Man. In the same years he wrote two more novels of other planets and a dream-fantasy of a bus ride from hell to heaven. The war years were the most productive of his life.

Ready Always to Give an Answer

The verse at the head of this chapter is Peter’s charge to Christians to be ready to give a reason for their hope. It has been called the charter of Christian apologetics, and Lewis took it as a description of his own vocation. But it is worth noticing the last three words: with meekness and fear. Lewis was not always meek. In argument he could be overbearing, and he knew it. But he did treat his hearers, whether airmen in a hut or listeners in a kitchen, with respect. He did not talk down to them. He took their objections seriously because he had once made them himself. And he gave his answers in fear, in the old sense of the word: in reverence before the God he was speaking about, and in the knowledge that he too would give account.