The Screwtape Letters, 31
The last letter opens with Screwtape’s promise to consume Wormwood in Hell because the Patient has been killed. “You have let a soul slip through your fingers.” He describes the Patient at the moment of his death: “There was a sudden clearing of his eyes … as he saw you for the first time … Just think (and let it be the beginning of your agony) what he felt at that moment; as if a scab had fallen from an old sore, as if he were emerging from a hideous, shell-like tether, as if he shuffled off for good and all a defiled, wet, clinging garment.” To cause Wormwood further pain, Screwtape explains exactly what the Patient saw in his dying moments: (more…)
In Letter 30 Screwtape is furious because, in a raid, the Patient was frightened “and thinks himself a great coward.” As the war provides no material for an intellectual attack on the man’s faith, Screwtape advises an attack on his emotions. “It turns on making him feel, when first he sees human remains plastered on a wall, that this is ‘what the world is really like’ and that all his religion has been a fantasy.”
In Letter 29, when it looks certain the Germans will bomb the Patient’s town, Wormwood tries to encourage cowardice in him. The Enemy permits wars because “moral issues really come to the point” in a dangerous world. “He sees as well as you do,” says Screwtape, “that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.”
As the war worsens Screwtape reveals in Letter 28 that Hell does not want the Patient killed by a bomb. “If only he can be kept alive, you have time itself for your ally.” Why? Because “The long, dull, monotonous years of middle-aged prosperity or middle-aged adversity” are Hell’s best “campaigning weather.” “It is so hard for these creatures to persevere. The routine of adversity, the gradual decay of youthful loves and youthful hopes, the quiet despair … all this provides admirable opportunities of wearing out a soul by attrition.”
Letter 27 concerns the “heads I win, tails you lose” argument about Prayer. “If you tried to explain to him,” says Screwtape, “that men’s prayers today are one of the innumerable co-ordinates with which the Enemy harmonizes the weather of tomorrow, he would reply that then the Enemy always knew men were going to make those prayers and, if so, they did not pray freely but were predestined to do so.” The Enemy, explains Screwtape, “does not foresee the humans making their free contributions in a future, but sees them doing so in His unbounded Now. And obviously to watch a man doing something is not to make him do it.” 
In Letter 26 Screwtape reveals how Unselfishness can be corrupted by the “Generous Conflict Illusion”: “Something quite trivial like having tea in the garden, is proposed. One member takes care to make it quite clear … that he would rather not but is, of course, prepared to do so out of ‘Unselfishness.’ The others instantly withdraw their proposal, ostensibly through their ‘Unselfishness,’ but really because they don’t want to be used as a sort of lay figure on which the first speaker practises petty altruisms … Passions are roused. Soon someone is saying ‘Very well then, I won’t have any tea at all!,’ and a real quarrel ensues.” 
In Letter 25 Screwtape finds the trouble with the Patient and his friends is that they are “merely Christian.” “What we want, if men become Christians at all, is to keep them in the state of mind I call ‘Christianity And.’ You know—Christianity and the Crisis, Christianity and the New Psychology … If they must be Christians let them at least be Christians with a difference.” 
As the Patient grows closer to Christian friends Screwtape reveals in Letter 24 how this friendship can be twisted into an “Inner Ring.” This is an important theme for Lewis: in his essay of this title Lewis says “I believe that in all men’s lives at certain periods, and in many men’s lives at all periods between infancy and extreme old age, one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.” One form of this desire is snobbery, but Lewis’s interest is in another kind. A man with an “itch” for this inner ring wants “the sacred little attic or studio, the heads bent together, the fog of tobacco smoke, and the delicious knowledge that we – we four or five all huddled beside this stove—are the people who know.” 
In Letter 23 Screwtape reveals Hell’s success in encouraging conceptions of a “historical Jesus.” “In the last generation we promoted the construction of such a ‘historical Jesus’ on liberal and humanitarian lines; we are now putting forward a new ‘historical Jesus’ on Marxian, catastrophic, and revolutionary lines … they all tend to direct men’s devotion to something which does not exist, for each ‘historical Jesus’ is unhistorical.” 
In Letter 22 Screwtape is furious that the Patient is in love with a Christian, and he complains that the Enemy is “a hedonist at heart” and that “Everything has to be twisted before it’s any use to us.”