Lewis says “religious doctrines are like maps”

In Mere Christianity, Lewis quoted an old army officer who said to him, “… I’m a religious man too. I know there’s a God. I’ve felt him: out alone in the desert at night: the tremendous mystery. And that’s why I don’t believe all your neat little dogmas and formulas about Him. To anyone who’s met the real thing they all seem so petty and pedantic and unreal” (119).
Lewis answered the old officer by saying that religious doctrines are like maps, and they are indeed like “turning from something real to something less real” (119). And yet, explained Lewis, a map is “based on what hundreds and thousands of people have found” rather than being based on a “single isolated glimpse” (119-120).