# “Hammer your way through a continued argument” by C.S. Lewis

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2017/06/27/hammer-your-way-through-a-continued-argument-by-c-s-lewis/
- Published: 2017-06-27T12:00:05-05:00
- Author: tollelege

“I should rather like to attend your Greek class, for it is a perpetual puzzle to
me how New Testament Greek got the reputation of being easy. St Luke I find particularly
difficult.

As regards matter– leaving the question of language– you will be glad to hear that
I am at last beginning to get some small understanding of St Paul: hitherto an author
quite opaque to me.

I am speaking now, of course, of the general drift of whole epistles: short passages,
treated devotionally, are of course another matter. And yet the distinction is not,
for me, quite a happy one.

Devotion is best raised when we intend something else. At least that is my experience.

Sit down to meditate devotionally on a single verse, and nothing happens. Hammer
your way through a continued argument, just as you would in a profane writer, and
the heart will sometimes sing unbidden.”

–C.S. Lewis, [“To Dom Bede Griffiths” (April 4, 1934)](http://amzn.to/2shujVc) in
[_The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis: Books, Broadcasts, and the War 1931-1949, Volume 2_](http://amzn.to/2shujVc),
Ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins, 2004), 136.

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