Summary
Screwtape scolds Wormwood for being pleased that bombs are coming. He explains what should be obvious: once the target is dead, the game is over. Hell only gets a short time to work on humans (a single lifetime), and if that is cut short, their window of opportunity is even more limited.
Screwtape explains that in his current state (working on defense, loving a Good Christian, etc.) were he to die in the air raid, he would "almost certainly be lost to us."
The Patient is in danger of being Saved!
Stepping back from the current crisis, Screwtape explains that a long life -- the dull slog of middle-age, for instance -- makes for "excellent campaigning weather," and that material prosperity can attach a man to the world, dragging him down.
He also muses on how some humans -- feeling the pain of a God-shaped-hole -- will try to fill it with fanciful visions of technology or psychology creating Heaven on Earth. But all of these things require time to work. And time runs out.
He concludes with a chilling thought: He (God) wants "some--but only a very few-- of the human animals with which He is peopling Heaven to have resisted us [Hell] through an earthly life of sixty or seventy years."
I think this means most humans who live to a ripe old age are damned?
My Thoughts
Again, the terrifying uncertainty of salvation comes through here. Most people who think they're saved probably aren't. Even if you've done okay -- at some point -- the current status of your soul can't entirely be known.
And again: my denomination rejects this view, but our version is even worse: at least in CSL's world, you can always turn your life around and start behaving. In Calvinism, if you're not elect, there's nothing you can do.
Screwtape's point about death being the end-game sets up the final chapters of the book.
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