“But the most part seemed to think that the mere fact of having contrived for themselves so much misery gave them a kind of superiority. ‘You have led a sheltered life!’ they bawled. ‘You don’t know the seamy side. We’ll tell you. We’ll give you some hard facts’—as if to tinge Heaven with infernal images and colours had been the only purpose for which they came. All alike, so far as I could judge from my own exploration of the lower world, were wholly unreliable, and all equally incurious about the country in which they had arrived. They repelled every attempt to teach them, and when they found that nobody listened to them they went back, one by one, to the bus. This curious wish to describe Hell turned out, however, to be only the mildest form of a desire very common among the Ghosts—the desire to extend Hell, to bring it bodily, if they could, into Heaven.”
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Clive Staples Lewis was born in Ireland, in Belfast on 29 November 1898. His mother was a devout Christian and made efforts to influence his beliefs. When she died in his early youth her influence waned and Lewis was subject to the musings and mutterings of his friends who were decidedly agnostic and atheistic. It would not be until later, in a moment of clear rationality that he first came to a belief in God and later became a Christian.
C. S. Lewis volunteered for the army in 1917 and was wounded in the trenches in World War I. After the war, he attended university at Oxford. Soon, he found himself on the faculty of Magdalen College where he taught Mediaeval and Renaissance English.
Throughout his academic career he wrote clearly on the topic of religion. His most famous works include the Screwtape Letters and the Chronicles of Narnia. The atmosphere at Oxford and Cambridge tended to skepticism. Lewis used this skepticism as a foil. He intelligently saw Christianity as a necessary fact that could be seen clearly in science.
"Surprised by Joy" is Lewis's autobiography chronicling his reluctant conversion from atheism to Christianity in 1931.