“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, The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, vol. 2: Books, Broadcasts and War 1931–1949, ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins; HarperSanFrancisco, 2004–2007), 2: 136.
