by Zach Kincaid
In 1959, Kenneth Carey invited C.S. Lewis to address the students of Anglican Theological College, Westcott House. Carey served as principal of the college and he would later become Bishop of Edinburgh. The subject of the talk was to be a response to the recent book by Alec Vidler called Windsor Sermons.
In it, Vidler "demythologizes" the Gospels, spinning them into a dance with modernity. Lewis, according to The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Vol. 2, thought it "quite incredible that we should wait nearly 2,000 years to be told by a theologian called Vidler that what the Church has always regarded as a miracle was, in fact, a parable.
In the paper that he presented to the students at Wescott House (titled "Fern-seed and Elephants") Lewis said:
A theology which denies the historicity of nearly everything in the Gospels to which the Christian life and affections and thought have been fastened for nearly two millennia - which either denies the miraculous altogether or, more strangely, after swallowing the camel of the Resurrection strains at such gnats as the feeding of the multitudes - if offered to the uneducated man can produce only one or other of two effects. It will make him a Roman Catholic or an atheist. (Collected Letters, Vol 2, 1076-77)
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