William Collins
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
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London SE1 9GF
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
16 Modern Translations of the Bible
18 The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment
24 Willing Slaves of the Welfare State
This book is not a collection of hitherto unpublished work, it is a collection of essays which are not presently in print but which Murray White of HarperCollins and myself thought should remain available to the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