Not many writers nowadays are on such terms of cordial insult with His Infernal Majesty as the ruddy Ulster-born … Mr. Clive Staples Lewis has shown himself to be in what is by now the most phenomenally popular household book of applied religion of the twentieth century, The Screwtape Letters. Not since another Oxford don chose to divest himself of his academic robes and slip down a rabbit-hole with Alice and the White Rabbit has the reading world been given such a divertissement by a race of spectacled savants….
For himself, [Mr. Lewis] has preferred to treat of [the devil] in these latter stages of degeneracy, when, like a certain Scottish thane, the forsworn recreant to a greater lord than Duncan has indeed grown old in evil and underneath the sinister mask the ravaged face begins to look faintly comic; but the button slips off both foils at times, as when, in Perelandra, Our Father Below decides to take a hand in the game; then Screwtape draws back, and the wrestling with Principalities and Powers begins. (p. 213)
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