Preaching for the second-rate

Mere Christianity
CS Lewis
read by Geoffrey Howard
running time 6hrs
Harper Collins £12.99

'God will not love you any the less, or have less use for you if you happen to have been born with a very second-rate brain,' claims Clive Staples Lewis, literary scholar, professor, critic and ex-atheist. This is reassuring and Lewis tries hard to explain Christianity to those who are intellectually less than first rate with his sometimes brilliant and other times dated, sexist and biggoted analogies.

Intemperance he describes as: 'A woman who devotes all her thoughts to clothes or bridge or her dog.' Whereas Pride, the 'complete anti-God state of mind', is fine in a man for 'his son, his father, his regiment'. He compares sex to food and serves up the analogy of a dish of meat displayed on stage and uncovered layer by layer to a baying audience. This is funny, but the attitudes of his time are displayed in his reference to 'the perverted desire of a man for a man' and his reference to 'horrible nations' and their 'horrible religions'.

Lewis expresses a desire to sound 'chatty'. Perhaps his original BBC broadcasts of what were lectures on Christianity, during the Second World War, achieved this but Geoffrey Howard, as the reader, portrays Lewis as formal and remote. In turn, the religion appears accessible only to the scholarly. As a work of philosophy, Mere Christianity is mind-boggling, but unlikely to convert the most wavering of present-day agnostics, especially women, homosexuals or those with a very second-rate mind.