The Sermon on the Mount (Bossuet)/Day 37
Thirty-seventh Day
On seeing the smallest faults of others, and being blind to our own greatest ones. — Matt. vii. 3-5.
JESUS CHRIST here sets forth another reason for not judging: — that our own offence may be greater than the one we condemn. ‘And why seest thou a mote in thy brother’s eye, and seest not a beam in thy own eye? ’
Thou hypocrite! The worst sort of hypocrisy is to be always condemning others. A man, in doing this, plays the virtuous himself: — he wants to have the strictness of his own morals, and the purity of his own principles, admired: — he would fain be considered an incorruptible character, who is above flattery and spares nobody; but — hypocrite as he really is — he never dreams of correcting himself. He dilates perpetually on the smallest defects of his neighbours, and never even suspects the enormity of those vices of which he is himself guilty. There are no such men on earth for being indulgent to themselves as these pitiless censors of other people’s lives.