The Screwtape Letters Part 1

A fictional account of a senior demon instructing another how to tempt. Some temptations I thought notable:

• Feelings. 'When they meant to ask Him Charity let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings...pray for courage, let them be trying to feel brave...praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven.'
• Doing nothing. 'spent most of my life doing neither I ought nor what I liked.'
• Improper speech or actions in the name of humor.
• Pleasures. As reluctance to face vanity and move to real happiness, the habit of excitement and flippancy become at once less pleasant and harder to forgo.
• Pride. Catch him the movement he is really poor in spirit, and smuggle in the reflection, 'By Jove! I'm being humble!' But don't awaken his sense of humor in the absurdity of this.
• Critics. Get him to be a church connoisseur, sampling churches, being a critic and not a pupil, and not committing to love and serve together with other sinners on their way to heaven. Critical of the sermon, the people, the order of service,  and the music.
• Time. Keep thought away from the present (relationship with God, bearing the present cross and receiving grace) and eternity (being concerned with Him). Tempt say a widow or a scholar to live in the past, but is better to make them live in the future, for that is least like eternity. The past is frozen, and gratitude looks to it, the present is lit up by Christ's promises, but in the future lies fear, avarice, lust and ambition.

Planning for the future is one of the present's responsibilities, but don't but your treasure and hopes in it, heaping on the altar of the future every real gift which is offered in the present.