Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless.\u00c2\u00a0 He cannot ravish.\u00c2\u00a0 He can only woo.\u00c2\u00a0 For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but yet themselves; merely to cancel them, or assimilate them, will not serve.\u00c2\u00a0 He is prepared to do a little overriding at the beginning.\u00c2\u00a0 He will set them off with communications of His presence which, though faint, seem great to them, with emotional sweetness, and easy conquest over temptation.\u00c2\u00a0 But He never allows this state of affairs to last long.\u00c2\u00a0 Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives.\u00c2\u00a0 He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs — to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish.\u00c2\u00a0 It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be.\u00c2\u00a0 Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. . . .\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0 He cannot ‘tempt’ to virtue as we do to vice.\u00c2\u00a0 He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there, He is pleased even with their stumbles.<\/p>\n
— Screwtape in The Screwtape Letters, <\/em>by C. S. Lewis, quoted in A Year with C. S. Lewis, <\/em>p. 136<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Merely to override a human will (as His felt presence in any but the faintest and most mitigated degree would certainly do) would be for Him useless.\u00c2\u00a0 He cannot ravish.\u00c2\u00a0 He can only woo.\u00c2\u00a0 For His ignoble idea is to eat the cake and have it; the creatures are to be one with Him, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,24,33,12],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-477","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-god","category-guidance","category-obedience","category-trust"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=477"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/477\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=477"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=477"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sonderbooks.com\/sonderquotes\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=477"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}