Truly Spiritual

On April 16, 1940, Lewis wrote to Dom Bede Griffiths:

One thing we want to do is kill the word 'spiritual' in the sense in which it is used by writers like Arnold and Croce. Last term I had to make the following remark to a room full of Christian undergraduates: 'A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep, in humility, thankfulness, and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride'--obvious to you, but I could see it was quite a new light to them.

--The Collected Letters of C. S. Lewis, Volume 2 (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 391