The Marsh-Wiggle Who Stomped Out Doubt

In C.S. Lewis's The Silver Chair, there is a moment that every believer should carry in their back pocket. The children and their companion Puddleglum — a gangly, pessimistic Marsh-wiggle — have descended deep underground, where the Green Witch begins weaving an enchantment. With sweet music and a heady incense, she whispers that there is no sun, no Narnia, no Aslan. Everything they remember about the world above, she insists, is just a children's fantasy built from the shadows of her underground kingdom.

And it almost works. The children's minds grow foggy. They begin to nod along.

Then Puddleglum, of all people — the least heroic figure in the room — stamps his bare foot into the enchanted fire. The pain clears his head. And he delivers one of the great speeches in all of literature: even if everything you say is true, he tells the Witch, the made-up world sounds like a better place than yours. "I'm going to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there isn't any Narnia."

Faith is not the absence of doubt. Faith is what stamps its foot in the fire when the enchantment gets thick. Every generation faces voices — sophisticated, soothing voices — insisting that God is a projection, that hope is naive, that the material world is all there is.

And faith answers: I have tasted something real, and I will not be talked out of it.