Logs & "Specktators"
by S. M. Hutchens
What the Lord said about the mote and the beam implies that if one does not pay proper attention to one's own sins and errors, he tends to develop a taste for other people's. I recall certain ladies of past acquaintance, connoisseuses of sin whose personal moral lives were -regarded among their coreligionists as irreproachable. They would painfully acknowledge trespasses like taking an extra chocolate or thinking critical thoughts about the sermon. But there seemed to be in them a love of sin as a kind of spectator sport, which led one to the impression that they simply would not be happy in a world where it was gone.
These ladies are joined in my recollections by men who would be profoundly disappointed by a heaven full of happily reconciled Catholics and Protestants, Wesleyans and Calvinists, and of believers to whom they had never preached their sect's version of the eternal Gospel—and even more disappointed at finding that something believed by other Christians was right while they were wrong. Such people look forward to heaven's vindication, but not to the gift of correction (these must be accepted together, or not at all), to learning the truth of things from the Final Authority himself, and to rejoicing in the wreck of every enmity in which Satan has bound the children of God.
S. M. Hutchens is a senior editor and longtime writer for Touchstone.
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