We tend to think this situation is new. And in one sense it is – because we personally have not experienced this before. But our experience is not the determiner of reality. Lewis reminds us that human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice and that “human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself.”

We are told that we are at war. It certainly feels like it, with much of the economy being either shut down or mothballed, citizens having wartime restrictions placed upon them and the situation changing from day to day.

C S Lewis faced a similar although graver providence when in the autumn of 1939 the Second World War broke out, and he found himself preaching a sermon in the Church of St Mary the Virgin in Oxford, to the students of the university. It is still a stunning sermon from which we have much to learn and to apply in our own situation.

He argues that we should have “an intimate knowledge of the past” – not because the past is ‘magical’ but because we cannot study the future and yet we need something with which to compare our current circumstances.

A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age,” he writes.

One can only guess at what Lewis would have said about the 24/7 outpouring on social media and the internet! There is much we can learn from the past. The trouble is that our news is filled with predictions about the future – about which we cannot know (but fear) – rather than what we do know.

Lewis argues that the war does not create a new situation. 

It simply aggravates the present human condition so that we can no longer ignore it,” he argues.

We tend to think this situation is new. And in one sense it is – because we personally have not experienced this before. But our experience is not the determiner of reality. Lewis reminds us that human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice and that “human culture has always had to exist under the shadow of something infinitely more important than itself”.

In his sermon Lewis warns us of three dangers in terms of our attitudes when we are faced with this kind of war.

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