Screwtape proposes another toast

I'd been meaning to link to this after The Anchoress pointed it out. Meghan Cox Gurdon, writing at the National Review Online, does a superb job imagining what C. S. Lewis's netherworld bureaucrat Screwtape might have to say about many modern moral issues, such as embryonic stem cell research, euthanasia, and Terri Schiavo. The key to unlocking the worst in the human heart, says Gurdon's Screwtape, is vanity.

"Vanity is a rusty key that was left lying about, and it was I alone who saw what it could unlock at this point in human history."

"It is true," Screwtape continues with a shrug, "that much of the groundwork was already laid. We had already convinced people of the rightness of destroying inconvenient life. Now they talk quite coolly of "blastocysts," and "clumps of cells" and "surplus embryos." My genius was to recognize that they needed just a little push to be convinced, with their mania for recycling, that by harvesting something that would otherwise be chucked out, they are doing a positive good! Think of it: They believe they occupy "the moral high ground." Oh, the profits for us — "

Go here for the whole thing.