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

On this episode, we are looking to the great writer, C.S. Lewis,

and we are going to camp out in one of his essays, Learning in War Time.

This was actually a chapel message that he delivered on the campus of Oxford University

during World War II. Lewis raises a very crucial question.

Should we be studying in war? In fact, on the first page, he asks,

why should we? Indeed, how can we continue to take an interest

in these placid occupations when the lives of our friends and the liberties of Europe

are in the balance? He goes on to answer this question, should we learn in war time?

One of the things that he tells us is that war does not introduce a new human situation.

War is an aggravation of the human situation that exists and that many times we ignore.

He says often in war, you hear people speaking of wanting to return to normal life,

and then he gives us this great quote. Life, Lewis says, has never been normal.

As you look over the decades, the centuries, the millennia, you see that life is full of crises,

full of alarms, full of difficulties, full of challenges, and yet in it all we human beings learn.

We explore, we debate, we carry on that placid occupation of learning.

In fact, Lewis brings up his own experience. He was in World War I. He left those ivy covered

environs of Oxford University and listing on June 8, 1917. Many months later, on April 15, 1918,

he was wounded in battle and then he was discharged in December of 1918, so he can write his own

experience in war. He remembers that as he and his fellow comrades were sent closer to the

front line, he and his brothers and arms, they would read books together, they would play cards

together. He says, being in the army, even right on the front line, did not obliterate his human

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