ews confronting the Gentiles on the
left--nor exactly the well-conducted and well-balanced people who
get there in Greek allegories--but a group of men and women who
realize where they are with a gasp of surprise. How has it come
about? The Judge tells them: "I was an hungered and ye gave me
meat," and the rest of the familiar words. But this does not quite
settle the question. Embarrassment rises on their faces--is it a
mistake? One of them speaks for the rest: "Lord, when saw we thee an
hungered and fed thee?" They do not remember it. There is something
characteristic there of the whole school of Jesus; these people are
"children of fact," honest as their Master, and they will not accept
heaven in virtue of a possible mistake. And it appears from the
Judge's answer that such instinctive deeds go further than men
think, even if they are forgotten. Wordsworth speaks of the "little
nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love" that are "the
best portion of a good man's life."[29] The acts of kindness were
forgotten just because they were instinctive, but, Jesus emphasizes
the point, they are decisive; they come, as another of his telling
phrases suggests, from "the overflow of the heart," and they reveal
it. With the people on the left hand it was the other way. They were
fairly well in possession of their good records, but they had missed
the decisive fact--they were instinctively hard. Such people Jesus
warns. So familiar are his words that there is a danger of our
limiting them to their first obvious meaning. Eighty years ago
Thomas Carlyle looked out on the England he knew, and remarked that
it was strange that the great battle of civilized man should be
still the battle of the savage against famine, and with that he
observed that the people were "needier than ever of inward
sustenance." Is there a warning in this picture of the people on the
left hand that applies to deeper things than physical hunger? A
warning to those who do not heed another's need of "inward
sustenance," of spiritual life, of God? It looks likely. Otherwise
there is a risk of our declining upon a "Social Righteousness" that
falls a long way short of John the Baptist's, and does less for any
soul, our own or another's.

The second class warned by Jesus consists of several groups dealt
with in the Sermon on the Mount--people whose sin is not murder or
adultery, but merely anger and the unclean thought--not the people
who actually give them