Life After Death

is always the Institute's evil Miss Hardcastle, her secret police and their sadistic methods to fall back upon, to ensure his absolute loyalty to his new masters. Lewis also uses his novel to explore the sterile relationship of Mark Studdock and his wife, Jane. The tensions spiral as she begins to repudiate the assumptions on which they had built their married life. She begins to have spiritual insights and is led by the appreciative and supportive Dimbles to Dr Ransom, who is pitted against the Institute. Ransom tells her that, "Your trouble has been what the old poets called Daungier. We call it Pride." There follows an examination of the feminine and masculine, and a rejoicing in the differences. Here Lewis foresaw some of the issues raised by contemporary feminism. Studdock's mistake was his desperate desire to be clubbable, to be included, and to be part of a new ascendancy. His journey of self-discovery; the easy assimilation of the weak into totalitarian organisations; an examination of the pressures which can so easily submerge our lives; the fashioning of the lie into an entire system, and personal capitulation to ambition are the core of this book. So is the anger that Mark and Jane both feel when they discover how badly they had been prepared for their battles. The deChristianisation of society, and the uselessness of their secular education and upbringing left them with little wisdom and no real knowledge. Just emptiness.

They cry out with frustration when they realise just how much they have lost.

Lewis, during his Oxford and Cambridge university days relished his battles with his own "Progressive Element". He passionately believed in the old alliance of eruditio et religio - scholarship and religion, culture and Christianity; that good scholarship without faith is as dry as dust; that building systems for life without God is so much rubbish. Lewis held that religion provides the necessary direction for living out the restless yearning for academic discovery. He would have agreed with St. Augustine that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. The Coming Peril In the 1990s there has been an almost complete break between Christian discipleship, public policy and civic values. It is no wonder then, that we have lost direction and are restless on an unprecedented scale. A person needs a deep and stable centre around which he can unify his various experiences. Christianity provides this. If we are to avoid becoming mechanical men and women, there must be this unity. Without it, the shattered mirror is incapable of reflecting the total man. G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis both perceived the dangers of the systematic secularisation of our world. Chesterton foresaw "the coming peril", describing it as "vast and vague ... of which capitalism and collectivism are only economic by-products" (The Chesterton Review, September 1995). Lewis and Chesterton prophetically wrote about the coming of eugenics, of the abuse of power, the presence of evil, and the corruption of man. Chesterton's Eugenics and other Evils (1923), and Lewis's The Abolition of Man (1943) both repay the attentions of today's readers. Even as he broadcast to the nation during the Second World War, encouraging and strenghthening his listeners, Lewis did not delude them into believing that victory over Nazism was enough. He knew that liberal