'Every age has its own outlook. It is specially good at seeing certain truths and specially liable to make certain mistakes. We all, therefore, need the books that will correct the characteristic mistakes of our own period. And that means the old books...None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we certainly shall increase it, amd weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can only be done by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People are no cleverer then than we are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes.'
CS Lewis, 'Introduction' in St.Athanasius, On the Incarnation, p.4.
