The lecturer, a short, thickset man with a ruddy face and a big voice,
was coming to the end of his talk. Gathering up his notes and books, he
tucked his hornrimmed spectacles into the pocket of his tweed jacket
and picked up his mortarboard. Still talking—to the accompaniment of
occasional appreciative laughs and squeals from his audience—he leaned
over to return the watch he had borrowed from a student in the front
row. As he ended his final sentence, he stepped off the platform. The maneuver gained him a head start on the rush of students down the
center aisle. Once in the street, he strode rapidly —his black gown
billowing behind his grey flannel trousers—to the nearest pub for a
pint of ale. Clive Staples Lewis was engaged in his full-time and favorite job—the
job of being an Oxford don in the Honour School of English Language &
Literature, a Fellow and tutor of Magdalen College and the most popular
lecturer in the University. To watch him downing his pint at the
Eastgate , or striding, pipe in mouth, across the
deer park, a stranger would not be likely to guess that C. S. Lewis is
also a best-selling author and one of the most influential spokesmen
for Christianity in the English-speaking world. Since 1941, when Lewis published a witty collection of infernal
correspondence called The Screwtape Letters, this middle-aged
bachelor professor who lives a mildly humdrum life
has sold something over a million copies of his 15 books. He has made
29 radio broadcasts on religious subjects, each to an average of
600,000 listeners. Any fully ordained minister or priest might envy
this Christian layman his audience. Something like Hell. That audience is the result of Lewis' special gift
for dramatizing Christian dogma. He would be the last to claim that
what he says is new; but, like another eloquent and witty popularizer
of Christianity, the late G. K. Chesterton, he has a talent for putting
old-fashioned truths into a modern idiom. With erudition, good humor and skill, Lewis is writing about religion
for a generation of religion-hungry readers brought up on a diet of
“scientific” jargon and Freudian cliches. His readers are a part of the
new surge of curiosity about Christianity which in Britain has floated,
besides Lewis, a whole school of literary evangelists . Detective Story Writer Sayers
has explained this new interest in Christianity as “spontaneous . . .
and not a sort of 'Let's-get-together-and-pep-up-Christianity' stunt by
excited missioners, than which nothing could be more detestable. . . .
People have discovered by bitter experience that when man starts out on
his own to build a society by his own power and knowledge, he succeeds
in building something uncommonly like Hell; and they have seriously
begun to ask why.”
