The Great Knock

“Iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend.”

— Proverbs 27:17, KJV

A Way Out

Jack’s letters home from Malvern were so wretched that even Albert, who often misread his sons, could see that something had to be done. Warnie, who was by then preparing for the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, had been sent to a private tutor, and had done well. In the summer of 1914 Albert decided to send Jack to the same man. In September of that year, a month after the outbreak of the Great War, the fifteen-year-old arrived at a house called Gastons in the village of Great Bookham, in Surrey, to be prepared for university by William Thompson Kirkpatrick.

Kirkpatrick had been Albert’s own headmaster at Lurgan College in County Armagh years before. He was by now retired, living with his wife in the Surrey countryside and taking a few private pupils. Albert called him the Great Knock, and so did his sons. He was a tall, lean, ruthless Ulster Scot with side whiskers and a voice like a bell, who had been brought up a Presbyterian and become a convinced atheist. He did not talk about religion much. He simply assumed that no intelligent man could believe it.

The Lesson on the Platform

Lewis told a story of his first meeting with Kirkpatrick that became famous. As they walked from the railway station, Jack, trying to make polite conversation, remarked that the Surrey countryside was wilder than he had expected. Kirkpatrick stopped and asked him what he meant by wild, and what grounds he had for expecting anything else. Within a few minutes the boy had been shown that he had no clear idea of what he had said, no evidence for his expectation, and therefore no right to an opinion at all. Kirkpatrick did not mean it unkindly. It was simply how he spoke. Every remark, however casual, was treated as a proposition to be defended.

Many boys would have been crushed. Jack loved it. For the first time in his life he was being taken seriously by a grown man. He learned to define his terms, to look for evidence, to spot a bad argument at a hundred yards and to say exactly what he meant. He would later say that he owed Kirkpatrick more than he owed almost any other teacher, and the debt is visible on nearly every page he wrote. The clarity of his prose, his habit of beginning with a definition, his relish for an argument and his impatience with muddle were learned in that house in Surrey.

Homer in Surrey

Kirkpatrick’s method of teaching languages was as direct as his conversation. On Jack’s first morning he sat down with him, opened Homer in Greek, read a passage aloud and translated it, and then left the boy to go on alone with a lexicon. Jack was soon reading Homer at speed and thinking in Greek. He read Latin the same way, and before he left Bookham he had added French, Italian and some German. The two and a half years were among the happiest of his life. He worked in the mornings, walked the Surrey lanes in the afternoons, read for himself in the evenings, and wrote long letters to Arthur Greeves about everything he read.

He also settled into his unbelief. Kirkpatrick never preached atheism to him, but the whole atmosphere of the house was rationalist, and Jack absorbed it. By sixteen he was writing to Arthur, with all the confidence of youth, that all religions were mythologies invented by human beings, that Christianity was one among them, and that he believed in none. He thought of himself as a hard-headed realist, and in his mind the beauty he loved in poetry and myth and the bleak universe described by science were two separate worlds that had nothing to do with each other.

A Confirmation He Regretted

There is one sad episode from these years. In December 1914, during the Christmas holidays, Jack was confirmed at St Mark’s, Dundela, and took his first Communion. He did it to please his father, and because he could not face the argument that would follow if he refused. He did not believe a word of it. Years later he looked back on this as one of the worst things he had ever done. He had, as he saw it, made a solemn act before God in a spirit of complete unbelief, and he had done it out of cowardice. It is a measure of how seriously the older Lewis took the sacraments that he never forgave himself lightly for that day.

A Book Bought at a Station

In March 1916 Jack was waiting at Leatherhead station for a train. He picked a cheap copy of a book off the station bookstall and bought it to read on the journey. It was Phantastes, a romance first published in 1858 by George MacDonald, a Scottish Congregational minister who had been forced out of his pulpit and had made his living as a writer and lecturer. The story follows a young man through a dreamlike fairy country of forests, castles and shadows.

Lewis read it that night and was overwhelmed. He wrote to Arthur that he had had a great literary experience. What he found in it he could not name for many years. It was not that the book persuaded him of anything. He had no idea, then, that MacDonald was a Christian, or that the quality that moved him so deeply had anything to do with the Christian faith. But he felt that a new kind of goodness had touched the longing he had known since childhood. The longing itself seemed cleaner and brighter afterwards, as if it had been washed. The verdict he gave in Surprised by Joy is one of the best-known sentences he ever wrote about himself: that the book had begun to work on his imagination, and that the rest of him took much longer to follow.

He was right about the delay. It would be fifteen years before the rest of him caught up. But George MacDonald became, in time, the writer Lewis loved and honoured above all others. Late in life he edited an anthology of MacDonald’s writings and called him his master. When, in one of his own stories, Lewis came to put a wise guide into a strange country, the guide was George MacDonald.

Iron Sharpening Iron

The verse at the head of this chapter speaks of friends sharpening each other, as one iron blade sharpens another. It describes the Bookham years well. An old atheist sharpened a young one, and the edge he put on Jack Lewis’s mind would one day be turned against everything Kirkpatrick believed. Kirkpatrick died in 1921, long before his pupil became a Christian, and we do not know what he would have made of it. But a God who uses unbelievers to prepare his servants is not hard to find in Scripture. Cyrus of Persia was called God’s shepherd without ever knowing God’s name. In a Surrey village, a ruthless logician who thought religion nonsense was training the most effective Christian apologist of his century.