A 44 Spectator " Competition SIR, —I cannot help feeling that
many of your readers must deplore as I do the choice of subject for competition in your last issue, on the grounds of its being in really bad taste. Not a few, I dare say, would join with me in objecting to it for its irreverence. The source of the expression " Pearly Gates " (Revelation xxi 21), in a passage of extreme
poetic beauty which .bas reference to the eternal home of the Saints of God, should have been enough to deter any humorist with a due sense of seemliness from bringing it into such an unsuitable connection. And to those who likb myself expect admission to the glories of Heaven only after undergoing the awfulness of the judgement of the Son of Man, the implication of all and sundry casually approaching the " Pearly Gates " with a display of the more superficial of their earthly charac- teristics is hardly less than appalling.
I do not of course suggest that people with such endearing qualities as those of Alfred Jingle, Mr. Salteena, Sherlock Holmes and the rest would be shut out of Heaven for their mannerisms, or even that they would for ever lose what endears them to us. It is the flippant-treatment of a most solemn and sacred moment of human existence that is deprecated.
" Humour is . . :the all-consoling, and (mark this) the all-excusing, grace of life." Thus. Mr. C. S. Lewis's Screwtape in the last paragraph but one of Letter XI, where humour is commended as one effective way of undermining religious foundations. This was worth saying.—Yours
374 Woodstock Road, Oxford.
[The justice of this comment must be frankly acknowledged. Through an oversight, for which circumstances provided some excuse but no defence, unhappy phrases in some of the entries for this competition unfortunately escaped notice till the paper was in print.—ED., Spectator.]
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