Misplaced Visions of Heaven and Hell

Fortunately, by God’s good providence, a strong and steady belief of that self-seeking and subreligious kind is extremely difficult to maintain, and is perhaps possible only to those who are slightly neurotic. Most of us find that our belief in the future life is strong only when God is in the center of our thoughts; that if we try to use the hope of “Heaven” as a compensation (even for the most innocent and natural misery, that of bereavement) it crumbles away. It can, on those terms, be maintained only be arduous efforts of controlled imagination; and we know in our hearts that the imagination is our own. As for Hell, I have often been struck, in reading the “hell-fire sermons” of our older divines, at the desperate efforts they make to render these horrors vivid to their hearers, at their astonishment that men, with such horrors hanging over them, can live as carelessly as they do. But perhaps it is not really astonishing. Perhaps the divines are appealing, on the level of self-centered prudence and self-centered terror, to a belief which, on that level, cannot really exist as a permanent influence on conduct–though of course it may be worked up for a few excited minutes or even hours.

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C. S. Lewis, Reflections on the Psalms (San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1986), 41-2.