The Devil's promotion of false spirituality - especially in prayer (C. S. Lewis)

[Reformed Covenanter]

False spirituality is always to be encouraged. On the seemingly pious ground that ‘praise and communion with God is the true prayer’, humans can often be lured into direct disobedience to the Enemy [God] who (in His usual flat, commonplace, uninteresting way) has definitely told them to pray for their daily bread and the recovery of their sick. You will, of course, conceal from him the fact that the prayer for daily bread, interpreted in a ‘spiritual sense’, is really just as crudely petitionary as it is in any other sense.

C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters: Letters from a Senior to a Junior Devil (1942; London: HarperCollins Publishers, Kindle Edition, 2009), p. 148.