Mystery And Anachronism

William Cowper coined the phrase, "God moves in a mysterious way...," which is quoted elsewhere in literature and in common speech. Poul Anderson has a priest's slave say:

"'The gods do move in mysterious ways.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), 209 B.C., p. 106 -

- two thousand years before Cowper.

Two further points:

CS Lewis refers to Cowper in The Great Divorce;

searching the blog for The Great Divorce shows in how many contexts I have referred to this Lewisian work.

It is Lewis' third great imaginative restatement of Christianity, after Ransom and Narnia. Each of these three narratives is connected to World War II and the Blitz, which links them to Anderson's very different work, "Time Patrol." Sherlock Holmes is a real person both in "Time Patrol" and in the chronologically first Narnia book, The Magician's Nephew.