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

- Link: https://tollelege.net/2023/06/19/hammer-your-way-through-a-continued-argument-by-c-s-lewis-2/
- Published: 2023-06-19T12:00:29-05:00
- 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, _[The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, vol. 2: Books, Broadcasts and War 1931–1949](https://amzn.to/3NB1Sy6),_
ed. Walter Hooper (New York: HarperCollins; HarperSanFrancisco, 2004–2007), 2: 136.

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