Continued from yesterday.
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I received your letter yesterday with a most satisfying amusement. Your progress, while still embryonic by our exacting standards, suggests that some of my earlier instructions have not been wholly wasted. Continue in this vein, and you may yet rise above the more deplorable ranks of our department.
Your chief concern must be those within the Church who see and who pray. We can easily keep the great majority of churchgoers distracted, but even a handful of awakened souls can be devastating. Do not be deceived by the seeming urgency of your other campaigns. Your principal labour must remain the maintenance of what we have come to call "the Veil."
The Veil, my dear Wormwood, is a blessed obscurity by which the Enemy’s detestable light is kept from shining too clearly among them. Under its shadow, a thousand evils may flourish unobserved. The hungry may languish in a different part of town, yet they will not see them. A man may torment his wife and children within sight of their pew and still be admired as a most respectable giver. As for the miseries of those beyond their borders? Well, those scarcely register at all. And should a flicker of awareness trouble them between breakfast and luncheon, we have only to smother it beneath the next mouthful.
I was most gratified to learn of your recent success in dismantling a tiresome organization which had been saving many lives abroad. Exquisite work! Think what diseases may now return to their proper dominions, what admirable harvests of hunger and despair may once again ripen. It does not, of course, approach the grandeur of our earlier enterprises, but it shows that you have profited by our instruction.
Such triumphs are, fortunately, among the easiest to preserve beneath the Veil. The average churchgoer will never see these children. Statistics can be ignored as dull or disputed as false, and any pang of compassion that slips through can be quickly soothed with a murmured prayer and a generous helping of pudding. The Veil, my dear Wormwood, remains one of the most serviceable instruments in our entire armoury.
I note with satisfaction that you have also made use of that most dependable instrument for deadening compassion -- misguidance. How lamentably tender-hearted the human species has become in recent decades! One longs for the more wholesome cruelties of earlier ages, when life itself was harsh enough to blunt the edge of sympathy. Since the detestable peace that followed the blessed War, compassion has enjoyed an alarming revival. Yet I entertain growing hopes that we may soon restore society to a state of more general hardship, where each creature’s own discomfort will once again suffice to drown out the cries of his neighbour.
How ingenious of you to employ the mantle of fiscal prudence as a disguise for throttling generosity. I see you have been studying my own methods with care. Conservatism, when properly administered, has ever been one of our most serviceable narcotics for the conscience. It permits the patient to imagine that he is defending “principle” when in fact he is merely defending his purse.
Our best results come when we blend this with a rosy illusion of the past -- an era that, of course, never quite existed. Remind them that the Church once “stood firm for truth,” and they will soon forget what truths it neglected. Let them cherish the past as holy ground, and we may quietly lead them to preserve its sins -- not to mention the past sins of society.
I dare say that by now, under the Veil, the majority of churchgoers have quite forgotten those thousands of growing numbers who are suffering abroad. Such, after all, is the exquisite efficacy of that device. Spare no effort, therefore, in maintaining it under the banner of the god of this world.
Do keep me apprised of your further operations. There is much yet you might learn from my continued counsel.
Your affectionate uncle,
Screwtape
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