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the forgiving Grace of God differ, one from another, and your comparison between those souls and a ray of pure white light striking a prism of clearest crystal is magnificent.
    The Church has always held that those whose entire lives have been lived in holy purity and in the Grace of God would hold a higher place in heaven than those whose lives have been sinful, even though God, in His graciousness, has forgiven them their sins. But no one had shown how this might be so. Your analogy, showing how the white light of the sun may be graded into the colours of the rainbow, ranging from red to violet, illustrates wonderfully how Our Lord will grade His chosen servants on the Last Day, when the sinful souls of the damned are cast into Darkness.
    There are other instances, almost too numerous to mention, which show your immense theological understanding and deep thought. So thought-provoking are they that I would not dare to comment on them until I have re-read and studied them carefully, for fear I should show my own shallowness of mind.
    It is my belief that your”Prinicpia Theologica” will be read, honoured, and loved by Christians for many centuries to come.
    I shall, of course, write to you further and at greater length on this monumental work.
    Praying for God’s blessing on you and your work, and for the fullness of God’s grace during the coming Eastertide,
    I am,
    Most faithfully yours,
    William Sancroft
    By Divine Permission
    Lord Archbishop of York

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BACKSTAGE LENSMAN

By Randall Garrett
     
    The Lensman series, comprising, as it does, some six hundred thousand words, is still, to my mind, the greatest space opera yet written. It has, to use one of Doc Smith’s favorite words, “scope.”
    E. E. Smith, Ph.D., had more scope, more breadth and depth of cognizance of the Cosmic All, than anyone before—or since.
    He had his flaws; we all do. But the grandeur of his writing overpowered those flaws, made them insignificant.
    I first wrote Backstage Lensman nearly thirty years ago. The original is long lost. There was no market for it in those days, and my moving about...well, it got lost. This is a re-creation from memory. It was a test of memory in another way, too: not once, during the writing, did I look into the Lensman for descriptions or phraseology or situations to parody. I’ve read those books so often over the years that there was no necessity for it. The style came naturally.
    Only once did my memory fail me. I was too accurate. I had to rewrite one paragraph because, when I checked with the original, it was word-for-word. And that’s plagiarism.
    Doc saw the first version of Backstage Lensman in 1949, and laughed all through the convention. It was his suggestion that I call the spaceship Dentless.

    On a planet distant indeed from Tellus, on a frigid, lightless globe situated within an almost completely enclosing hollow sphere of black interstellar dust, in a cavern far beneath the surface of that abysmally cold planet, a group of entities indescribable by, or to, man stood, sat, or slumped around a circular conference table.
    Though they had no spines, they were something like porcupines; though they had no tentacles, they reminded one of octopuses; though they had no wings or beaks, they seemed similar to vultures; and though they had neither scales nor fins, there was definitely something fishy about them.
    These, then, composed the Council of the Meich, frigid-blooded poison-breathers whose existence at temperatures only a few degrees above zero absolute required them to have extensions into the fourth and fifth dimensions, rendering them horribly indescribable and indescribably horrible to human sight.
    Their leader, Meichfrite, or, more formally, Frite of the Meich, radiated harshly to others of the Council: “The time has now come to consider the problem of our recent losses in the other galaxy. Meichrobe, as Second of the Meich, you will report first.”
    That worthy pondered