My Dear Mogslopper,

I have heard of your valiant attempts to tempt your patient to great vice. But I must remind you that Normalcy is the greater ally of devilry. When the status quo supports Our Father Below, we would work to preserve it. But the opposite is also true: mischief on the part of the young is often borne out of an attempt to break up the 'normal.' So on the one hand, you might encourage intemperance and rebellion against the status quo when it is sufficiently important to the Enemy--remember His followers wrote all that rubbish about obeying the caesars who were (delightfully) skewering them by the dozen. On the other hand, emotional coldness and perhaps, with some added tempting on your part, Hardness of Heart can be encouraged through long periods of Normalcy and inattentiveness. In these cases questioning is from the Enemy; mute acceptance--blind faith if you will--is our chief aim. And yet Normalcy can be a great boon to the vermin on behalf of the Enemy. A hot cup of coffee delivered by a loved one in the midst of a blizzard is a detestable form of charity and humanity--but it is as "normal" as it comes. Simple embracing between a parent and child is "normal," but I daresay it is one of Our Enemy's favorite expressions of fondness. The "normal" in a setting of great adversity can give a man courage; normal life--the purr of a man's pet cat, for instance--has kept great evil from taking shape in man's heart more than once in human history. The average, the familiar, can yank a man's heart away from us at the very moment of conquest. When we wield the tool of the mundane, we must remind ourselves that we are handling something the Enemy first fashioned for the pleasure of the bipedal brutes. Common, usual, homely things exist because He wants them to find degrees of solace even in the midst of trials and temptations. It is, as He says--though we doubt it--in weakness that He shows great strength. When you combine weakness with a lack of glamour, a lack of showiness, a lack of self-absorption, a lack of avarice, etc., you will see just how dangerous Normalcy can be to Our Cause But this great strength built in to the common--namely simple human pleasure and contentment--can be used for opposite effect. Contentment, or the lure of it, can be replaced with its demonic equivalent, complacency. A man may be made unwilling to change either his socks or his sins for fear of losing the small hollow happiness given him through doing nothing. Why, one of the best uses of the mundane is merely to distract a patient's mind from contemplating higher things. More than once, when the Enemy has drawn near enough to whisper something in my patient's ear (what it was, I never heard) I had only to point out that he was a mite peckish and there was a ballgame on, that he might enjoy some cheese and crackers in front of the television. He had forgotten all about the Enemy's suggestion by the time he had taken his seventh step toward the refrigerator. Affectionately, Your Uncle