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.

This spirit is always accompanied by ignorance of one's own faults,
which makes him who indulges in it ludicrous. So our Lord would seem to
intend by the figure of the mote and the beam. It takes a great deal of
close peering to see a mote; but the censorious man sees only the mote,
and sees it out of scale. No matter how bright the eye, though it be
clear as a hawk's, its beauty is of no moment to him. The mote
magnified, and nothing but the mote, is his object; and he calls this
one-sided exaggeration 'criticism,' and prides himself on the accuracy
of his judgment. He makes just the opposite mistake in his estimate of
his own faults, if he sees them at all. We look at our neighbour's
errors with a microscope, and at our own through the wrong end of a
telescope. We see neither in their real magnitude, and the former
mistake is sure to lead to the latter. We have two sets of weights and
measures: one for home use, the ot