Often great writers who are not Christians nonetheless show tremendous insight into human nature. Those insights, however, rarely lead to biblical conclusions about how to deal with man’s sins and society’s ills. Moliere, a playwright subject to the censorship of Louis XIV and the Catholic Church in seventeenth-century France, was a keen observer of human nature and society’s problems, but he was no social reformer. His plays, however, can be helpful in shedding light on man’s hypocrisy – a problem for which only the Gospel provides a real and lasting solution. The latest addition to the literature website is Moliere’s The Misanthrope, which humorously points out the wrongness of taking the speck out of your brother’s eye without first removing the log from your own, but fails to suggest how that log ought to be removed.
