Wit & Attitude Quote by C. S. Lewis

Hell arrives like bad infrastructure: not with a collapsing bridge, but with a smooth new highway that makes you forget you are traveling anywhere at all. Lewis, a Christian apologist with a novelist's eye for moral psychology, rigs the line like a cautionary parable against modernity's favorite lie: that danger only looks like danger. The phrasing is engineered to seduce. "Safest" is the wicked pivot, yoking security to damnation. You can feel the trap closing in the very comfort of the sentence.

Lewis builds the metaphor with tactile persuasion - "gentle slope", "soft underfoot" - the language of ease, convenience, and self-care. Sin isn't framed as a melodramatic plunge; it's ergonomic. Then he strips the road of the ordinary frictions that make people reflect: no "sudden turnings" to jar you awake, no "milestones" to measure drift, no "signposts" to warn that you've crossed a line. The subtext is less about a single moral lapse than about incrementalism as a spiritual technology: small permissions, repeated until they feel like personality.

The context sits comfortably inside The Screwtape Letters-era Lewis, where the demonic strategy isn't to tempt you into headline-grabbing vice but to manage your attention, blur your thresholds, keep you pleasantly unalarmed. It's also a critique of a culture that treats conscience like anxiety to be soothed. The road is "safe" because it removes the very signals that might force a choice. Lewis is warning that the most dangerous path is the one that never demands you notice you're on it.