I have finished the essay you linked me to. Considering that I have just finished a long polemical essay, I hope you will forgive me if I don't tackle the whole of it in a systematic way; but I am afraid that the more I went into it, the worse it seemed to me. He misrepresents Narnia (where the Fall was partly averted, unlike our world, as everyone who read The Magician's Nephew ought to know) as being exactly like our world, and therefore having the same relationship with the Second Person of the Trinity. He does not connect Lewis' mention of Aslan "coming and going" with his devastating account of spiritual dryness in The Screwtape Letters, which is what Lewis obviously meant: that is, that there are times when we subjectively feel incapable of perceiving the presence of God in any way. The Narnia stories, after all, were very much written for children, and Lewis was not going to deliver as desolating and frightful a description of spiritual loneliness as he did elsewhere; but there can be no doubt that, by the "absence" of Aslan, he meant exactly that - that dreadful mystery that led God Himself to scream "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Indeed, by making this mistake, the author even fails to bring the proper theological charge against Lewis: that is, that he seems to have mistaken the Second Person with the Third, since it is the Spirit whose absence we feel in the periods of dryness. The worst of all is the denial of Lewis having any belief in the Sacrament and the Real Presence. What on Earth did Lewis have to say for this person to listen? He said that the Sacrament was the holiest object we will meet on this Earth; that we are under an absolute obligation to attend the Eucharist every week, and to do so at our territorial parish (scarcely a Protestant doctrine!); and that the redeeming power of the Eucharist is as real as the mightiest magic in the fables - favete linguis, be still and know I am the Lord. The whole essay seems to me written in the spirit, not of a sympathetic inquirer, but of an able though not over-scrupulous prosecutor out to get a conviction by hook or by crook.
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