Their threats are terrible enough, but we could bear
All that; it is their promises that bring despair.
If beauty, that anomaly, is left us still,
The cause les in their poverty, not in their will.
If they had power (‘amenities are bunk’), conceive
How their insatiate gadgetry by this would leave
No green, nor growth, nor quietude, no sap at all….
Their happiest fancies dwell upon a time when Earth
Flickering with sky-signs, gibbering with mechanic mirth,
One huge celestial charabanc, will sink and roll
Through patient heaven, subtopianized from pole to pole.
C.S. Lewis (1893-1963), Lines during a General Election
In 1951, England was embroiled in a bitter general election campaign. Six years earlier the Conservative Party of Winston Churchill had been thrown out of power, but Churchill, was attempting a comeback. The conventional wisdom was that the attempt would fail. The conventional wisdom was wrong and the next morning the whole world knew that the the Conservative Party had recaptured control of Parliament and Churchill had regained the post of Prime Minister. Shortly afterwards he sent a letter to C. S. Lewis, inviting him to receive the award of CBE (Commander of the British Empire). Lewis declined the proposed honour. He wrote back to Churchill's secretary that he was grateful for the recognition, but he worried about the political repercussions: 'There are always knaves who say, and fools who believe, that my religious writings are all covert anti-leftist propaganda, and my appearance in the Honours List would of course strengthen their hands. It is therefore better that I should not appear there.' Rejecting the notion of a peculiarly 'Christian' morality, Lewis argued for the existence of a natural moral law known by all through human reason.
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