of nothing, and knowest not that thou are wretched and miserable and poor and blind and naked." For no man is a judge in his own cause, not because he has not within him a voice to call him to account, but because that voice, conscience, is apt to be stilled or perverted by self-love and self-conceit. In examining ourselves we find it hard to be strictly honest, to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, to admit that a beam in the eye is a beam indeed and not a mere mote. And even when we do succeed fairly well in extracting all the evidence for and against, we still decide the case according to a standard all our own, and the prisoner in consequence is honorably acquitted or even highly commended. Sin, too, is something that is ever recurring, and the judge soon tires and grows lax with usage. Favorable self-judgments, I have said, are usually erroneous, and, in a measure, the same is true of all selfjudgments. Even the publican's estimate of himself was just only in so far as it was self-depreciatory. Christ's commendation of him, that he went down to his house justified rather than the Pharisee, is, you notice, more relative than absolute. Doubtless there were many other grades of society, the Gentiles, the harlots, the unclean, upon whom the publican, Jew as he was, would have looked as the Pharisee looked on him, and with his lips have thanked God and in his heart have thanked himself, as did the Pharisee, that he was not as some other men. Or perhaps his self-depreciation, like the Pharisee's complacency, was based on the notion that outward observance is
