Welcome back to another episode of Five Minutes in Church History.

On this episode, we are beginning a series of looking at four books.

It's August, and there's still time to get in your beach reading.

And so the first book is an ancient book.

It's by Athanasius, and it's called On the Incarnation.

You'll likely be the only person at the beach with that book, but I'm telling you it's worth it.

Now, find an addition that has Lewis's preface. For one of the published translations, Lewis wrote a

preface, and that preface has come to stand on its own as a piece of literature.

He begins the preface by saying there is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient books should be read only by the professionals,

and that the amateurs should content himself with the modern books.

He says he learned this as a professor of English and a student would encounter Platonism, and they wouldn't go. They wouldn't even think of, Lewis says, going to a shelf in the library and pulling off a book by Plato. Instead, they'll read some modern author. And Lewis says, and that modern author is likely to be ten times more boring than

the original text. Lewis points out that this is especially true in theology, that reading a lot of

the modern books, rather than going back to the classic authors and to the ancient authors,

such as Athanasius. Lewis gives what he calls a good rule, and that is that

every time you read a new book, you don't allow yourself to read another new book until you read

an ancient book in between. And he does make a concession. How about go three modern books and then read an ancient book?

Well, that's Lewis's preface about ancient books.

Let's look at what Lewis has to say about the author of this ancient book.

And the author, of course, is Athanasius.

Lewis tells us his epigraph is Athanasius contra mundum,

Athanasius against the world. We are proud that our own country, he says, speaking of Britain,

of course, has more than once stood against the world. Athanasius did the same. He stood for

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