Ultimately, Tolkien’s legacy to Lewis, though their friendship would receive a later rift over this very issue, would be getting him to see that fiction was a vehicle through which issues of morality could be explored—though not specifically those themes of Christianity itself. Those, Tolkien believed, should be reserved only for ordained priesthood, not attempted by laypeople. Lewis, however, saw worlds of possibility opening, offering ways to bring people to a consideration of Christianity—if only obliquely, through allegory— with imagination as the carrier.
