The contemptuous way in which you spoke of gluttony as a
means of catching souls, in your last letter, only shows
your ignorance. One of the great, achievements of the last
hundred years has been to deaden the human conscience on
that subject, so that by now you will hardly find a sermon
preached or a conscience troubled about it in the whole
length and breadth of Europe. This has largely been effected
by concentrating all our efforts on gluttony of Delicacy,
not gluttony of Excess. Your patient's mother, as I learn
from the dossier and you might have learned from Glubose, is
a good example. She would be astonished--one day, I hope,
will be--to learn that her whole life is enslaved to this
kind of sensuality, which is quite concealed from her by the
fact that the quantities involved are small. But what do
quantities matter, provided we can use a human belly and
palate to produce querulousness, impatience,
uncharitableness, and self-concern? Glubose has this old
woman well in hand. She is a positive terror to hostesses
and servants. She is always turning from what has been
offered her to say with a demure little sign and a smile "Oh
please, please...all I want is a cup of tea, weak but not
too weak, and the teeniest weeniest bit of really crisp
toast". You see? Because what she wants is smaller and less
costly than what has been set before her, she never
recognises as gluttony her determination to get what she
wants, however troublesome it may be to others. At the very
moment of indulging her appetite she believes that she is
practising temperance. In a crowded restaurant she gives a
little scream at the plate which some overworked waitress
has set before her and says, "Oh, that's far, far too much!
Take it away and bring me about a quarter of it". If
challenged, she would say she was doing this to avoid waste;
in reality she does it because the particular shade of
delicacy to which we have enslaved her is offended by the
sight of more food than she happens to want.
--C. S. Lewis, _The Screwtape Letters_
--
dpbsmith at world dot std dot com
(replace "at" with at-sign and "dot" with period and remove spaces)