“I read Grace Abounding in Everyman, having (your remember) read Mr Badman in the same volume on the way over. Grace Abounding is incomparably the better of the two. Some of the sentences in it reach right down. ‘But the milk and honey is beyond this wilderness’ – ‘I thought I could have spoken of his love and his mercy even to the very crows that sat upon the ploughed lands before me’ – ‘I could not find that with all my soul I did desire deliverance.’ Of course a great part of it paints the horrors of religion and sometimes almost of insanity. What do you make of the curious temptation that assailed him just after he had been converted and felt himself united to Christ; when a voice kept saying ‘Sell Him, sell Him’: sometimes for hours at a stretch, until in mere weariness Bunyan blurted out ‘Let Him go if he will’ – which afterwards led him into despair, believing he had committed the unpardonable sin?

I suppose this is the same mental disease of which you and I have felt a trace in the impulse to throw ones new book in the fire – some strange twist that impels you to do a thing because it is precisely the one thing of all others that you don’t want to do.

I should like to know, too, in general, what you think of all the darker side of religion as we find it in old books. Formerly I regarded it as mere devil worship based on horrible superstitions. Now that I have found, and am still finding more and more, that element of truth in the old beliefs, I feel I cannot dismiss even their dreadful side so cavalierly. There must be something in it: only what.

Walter Hooper, ed., The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis: Family Letters 1905-1931 (San Francisco: Harper, 2004), 850; letter to his friend, Arthur Greeves, dated 22 December, 1929, on his reading of John Bunyan.