Compelling Reason

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

First published in Great Britain by Fount Paperbacks in 1996

This ebook edition published by William Collins in 2017

Copyright © 1996 C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd

Foreword copyright © 1996 C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd

Walter Hooper asserts the moral right to be identified as the compiler of this work

The material in this compilation was previously published in: ‘First and Second Things’, first published in Undeceptions by Geoffrey Bles, London 1971; first Fount Paperbacks edition published in 1985 (essays 2, 3, 6, 10, 13, 15, 16, 18, 21); copyright © 1985 C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd. ‘Present Concerns’, first published in 1986 by Fount Paperbacks (essays 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 17, 22, 23); copyright © 1986 C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd. ‘Timeless at Heart’, first published in 1987 by Fount Paperbacks (essays 1, 12, 14, 19, 20, 24); copyright © 1970, 1980, 1987 C.S. Lewis Pte Ltd

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008220884

Ebook Edition © June 2017 ISBN: 9780008228514

Version: 2017-05-24

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Foreword by Douglas Gresham

1 Why I Am Not a Pacifist

2 Bulverism

3 First and Second Things

4 Equality

5 Three Kinds of Men

6 ‘Horrid Red Things’

7 Democratic Education

8 A Dream

9 Is English Doomed?

10 Meditation in a Toolshed

11 Hedonics

12 Christian Apologetics

13 The Decline of Religion

14 Religion Without Dogma?

15 Vivisection

16 Modern Translations of the Bible

17 On Living in an Atomic Age

18 The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment

19 The Pains of Animals

20 Is Theism Important?

21 Xmas and Christmas

22 Prudery and Philology

23 Is History Bunk?

24 Willing Slaves of the Welfare State

Original Sources

Footnotes

About the Author

Other Books By C.S. Lewis

About the Publisher

FOREWORD

This book is not a collection of hitherto unpublished work, it is a collection of essays which are not presently in print but which Murray White of HarperCollins and myself thought should remain available to the reading public. One of the legacies which one inherits from a great writer is the responsibility to try to ensure that his minor works do not vanish from publication, or at the very least that they do not vanish until people no longer want to read them.

In this volume, we have tried to select those essays of Jack’s (C. S. Lewis) which are applicable to today’s world and still very much in demand. Jack said that a writer should not try to be ‘modern’ or ‘up to date’ because the more that he achieves it, the more he ensures that in a very short time he will be ‘out of date’. And it is this ability to achieve timelessness which so characterizes the best of Jack’s essays and articles. It is inevitable that some of what Jack wrote is coloured and affected by his upbringing and the environment in which he lived, but the crystal clarity of his thinking frequently enabled him to cut through the shrouds of his era and reach to the very heart of matters which will concern men and women of thought for all time. We hope that you will find this phenomenon exemplified in this book.

Douglas Gresham

Ireland 1996

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