Wumpick and Safety

My Dear Wumpick,

I find it rather ironic, all this talk of yours about making your patient "safe."  Of course you would like your patient to be "safe"—safely ensconced in her little tomb, shelved among the myriads of others who have already found their way to Our Father Below.  That is the sort of safety to which all tempter aspire on behalf of their patients.  But "safe" among the humans is the same as dead. 
No amount of indoctrination on your part will change the fact that, up almost until the very last moments of her life, your patient will be assailed by the weapons, and even the words of the Enemy.  You must not forget that we are, after all, at war.  The Enemy will debase and degrade himself in wooing those who have betrayed him a hundred times over; he is nothing if not persistent in his obnoxious attentions.

I suppose you have been reading our propaganda material again, instead of attending to useful subjects like "Sixteen Ways to Transform Temptations of the Flesh into Spiritual Pride" or "Disengaging 'Logic': A Brief Methodology."  If you must waste your time on the trash we publish for the little bipeds, I wish you would be less credulous about it.

Recent developments have led us to stress a certain kind "safety" in their view of the Enemy, which is really a new form of Quietism.  Among the secular humans, it takes the form of indifferentism: they assume that, because the Enemy describes himself as "loving" and "merciful" (sheer lies, even by his own fallacious definitions), he doesn't care what they do.  Among some Christians, particularly among those Christian denominations known as "evangelical", this new Quietism has revolves around the concept of being "saved": If a human only accepts [name censored] as his personal Lord and Savior, then the aforementioned love and mercy take over.

Human nature makes both of the new Quietisms remarkably easy to adjust a patient's mind to—especially as Quietism seems to provide a humble and simple alternative to the Pelagianism of the modern progressive vision.  What the humans do not realize is that Quietism, with its "trust" in God and Pelagianism, with its "trust" in men, are both, by the Enemy's standards, gross forms of presumption.  The former philosophy teaches men that they need do no work at all to attain their salvation—a ridiculous and inconsistent belief, given that traitor Saul's lines about fear and trembling—while the latter one teaches them that their work will take them to heaven—an equally foolish supposition, since the Enemy himself decreed that "with man, this is impossible."  The former philosophy presumes on the Enemy's weakness, and the latter on human beings' strength.  Both philosophies, of course, spring from sloth—from the human desire to get the most done with the least effort and risk—in other words, from the human desire to "play it safe."

But just because we are encouraging the humans to "play it safe," and teaching them that goodwill and pseudo-magical formulas will gain them entry into heaven, you must not suppose that it is true!  Much less that a similar formula exists for getting them into hell!

Of course, the Enemy does promise a kind of safety to those humans who follow him.  He has, in fact, promised it from the beginning, although we managed to keep it largely under wraps until that women Margaret publicized the secret.  We had only just managed to make succeeding generations forget her when the Enemy used that Slavic female to preach the same doctrine.  (You notice how he always chooses women for these jobs?  It helps to lure the sentimental humans over to his side.)  But the safety that the Enemy does promise has nothing to do with sign-on-the-dotted-line, one-time acknowledgements of his authority, much less with the sleepy supposition that he doesn't really care what happens on earth, as long as everyone plays nicely together.  The only kind of safety the Enemy offers is conditional: "Come to me, and I will give you rest."  Rest!  And of course, the process of "coming" is, as the Enemy sees it, lifelong.  To a human who keeps on "coming", no intimacy with the Enemy is denied.  But there is never a moment when the human can say, looking the Enemy in the eye, "Well, here we are.  I'm safe now," because the very place in which he stands (spiritually as well as physically) is the Enemy's territory.

Of course, the Enemy says that the humans really are safe with him, and he only wants the humans to "trust" him, and not rely on themselves.  But as you know, it is a foundational doctrine of hell that no one can every be truly safe on another's ground.

Not, by the by, that I would try to directly convince your patient of that.  Let it slip in quietly.  Most grownup humans have learned years ago that they can't really trust each other, and so the idea that they could trust the Enemy is not one that will naturally occur to them—unless it be raised by one of the Enemy's people, or by a careless tempter who is being a little too loose on the job ...

Your affectionate uncle,

Slangrine.