Calvin's Institutes

I mentioned on my Facebook page that I was going to be bored during the enforced leisure of my convalescence from foot surgery earlier this week. Beau Weston (The Gruntled Center) advised me to read Calvin. I decided to give it a try, since the full text of the Institutes of the Christian Religion is on my laptop. And besides, "Calvin" is my middle name....

It wasn't long (like the second paragraph) before I read this:

"... For, since we are all naturally prone to hypocrisy, any empty semblance of righteousness is quite enough to satisfy us instead of righteousness itself. And since nothing appears within us or around us that is not tainted with very great impurity, so long as we keep our mind within the confines of human pollution, anything which is in some small degree less defiled delights us as if it were most pure just as an eye, to which nothing but black had been previously presented, deems an object of a whitish, or even of a brownish hue, to be perfectly white. ..."

Very thought provoking and a mirror that I would rather not look into. But, I'm afraid I'm going to have to.