cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you. 7.  Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you:  8.  For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. 9.  Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone? 10.  Or if he ask a fish, will he give him a serpent? 11.  If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask Him? 12.  Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them:  for this is the law and the prophets.’—­MATT. vii. 1-12.

I. How can we help ‘judging,’ and why should we not ‘judge’?  The power of seeing into character is to be coveted and cultivated, and the absence of it makes simpletons, not saints.  Quite true:  but seeing into character is not what Jesus is condemning here.  The ‘judging’ of which He speaks sees motes in a brother’s eye.  That is to say, it is one-sided, and fixes on faults, which it magnifies, passing by virtues.  Carrion flies that buzz with a sickening hum of satisfaction over sores, and prefer corruption to soundness, are as good judges of meat as such critics are of character.  That Mephistophelean spirit of detraction has wide scope in this day.  Literature and politics, as well as social life with its rivalries, are infested by it, and it finds its way into the church and threatens us all.  The race of fault-finders we have always with us, blind as moles to beauties and goodness, but lynx-eyed for failings, and finding meat and drink in proclaiming them in tones of affected sorrow.  How flagrant a breach of the laws of the kingdom this temper implies, and how grave an evil it is, though thought little of, or even admired as cleverness and a mark of a very superior person, Christ shows us by this earnest warning, embedded among His fundamental moral teachings.

He points out first how certainly that disposition provokes retaliation.  Who is the Judge that judges us as we do others?  Perhaps it is best to say that both the divine and the human estimates are included in the purposely undefined expression.  Certainly both are included in fact.  For a carping spirit of eager fault-finding necessarily tinges people’s feelings towards its possessor, and he cannot complain if the severe tests which he applied to others are used on his own conduct.  A cynical critic cannot expect his victims to be profoundly attached to him, or ready to be lenient to his failings.  If he chooses to fight with a tomahawk, he will be scalped some day, and the bystanders will not lament profusely.  But a more righteous tribunal than that of his victims condemns him.  For in God’s eyes the man who covers not his neighbour’s faults with the mantle of charity has not his own blotted out by divine forgiveness.