By 1925 Lewis had cast off the stern atheism of his younger days. “It will be a comfort to me all my life to know that the scientist and the materialist have not the last word,” he wrote, “that Darwin and Spencer, undermining ancestral beliefs, stand themselves on a foundation of sand.”84 Lewis’s postwar friendships prevented him from adopting the moral indifference—what he called the “shallow pessimisms”—so typical of his generation.85 They pressed upon him questions for which he had no credible answer.
