It increases the patient’s reluctance to think about the Enemy. If such a feeling is allowed to live, but not allowed to become irresistible and flower into real repentance, it has one invaluable tendency. If it gets too strong it may wake him up.if you suppress it entirely.we lose an element in the situation which can be turned to good account. This dim uneasiness needs careful handling. “As long as he retains externally the habits of a Christian he can still be made to think of himself as one who has adopted a few new friends and amusements but whose spiritual state is much the same.And while he thinks that, we do not have to contend with the explicit repentance of a definite, fully recognised, sin, but only with his vague, though uneasy, feeling that he hasn’t been doing very well lately. Our cause is never more in danger than when a human, no longer desiring, but still intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” 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. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. It is during those trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. He leaves the creature to stand up on its own legs-to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. Sooner or later He withdraws, if not in fact, at least from their conscious experience, all those supports and incentives. But He never allows this state of affairs to last long. “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.

Cs lewis the screwtape