The Ulsterior Motive

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Revision as of 20:01, 29 March 2014 by 70.192.134.34 (talk) (I changed "Progress" to "Regress" in the title of Lewis's work.)

"The Ulsterior Motive" is the title of an unpublished essay by J.R.R. Tolkien written in 1964. The essay derived from a critique of the posthumous publication of C.S. Lewis's Letters to Malcolm.[1][2]

Extracts from the essay were published in Humphrey Carpenter's The Inklings:[3]

It was not for some time that I realized that there was more in the title Pilgrim's Regress than I had understood (or the author either, maybe). Lewis would regress. He would not re-enter Christianity by a new door, but by the old one: at least in the sense that in taking it up again he would also take up, or reawaken, the prejudices so sedulously planted in boyhood. He would become again a Northern Ireland protestant.

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