Harsh Criticisms
We often sit with amazement and hear people tear to pieces reputations that have been a quarter of a century forming. Men, and women too, seize with avidity evil reports, and like maggots run in and out the carcasses of fallen character. Society becomes a great slaughter-house in which honorable names are strangulated and butchered.
When a man begins to totter a little in his integrity or Christian principle, instead of gathering around to steady him, and keep him from complete prostration, we come out from our homes and our associations to push him flat down.
Talebearers almost always deal in superlatives. If a man shows a little impatience, they say he was livid with rae. If he were seen taking a glass, they call him a besotted inebriate. They put the blow-pipe of their exaggeration into the slightest inconsistency, and blow till the cheeks are distended, and the bubble swells, and the story is rounded into a great orb in which swim all the rainbows of conceit, and you can see almost anything you want to see. They are hounds, good for nothing but a chase.
When you hear evil of any one, suspend judgment. Do not decide till you have heard the man’s defence. Do not run out to meet every heated whelp of malice that runs with its head down and its tongue out. The probability is that it is mad, and will only bite those who attempt to entertain it.
Be lenient with the fallen. You see a brother fall, and say, “J never could have done that!” Perhaps you could not, because your temptation does not happen to be in that direction; but you have done things in the course of your life that these fallen men would never have done, because their temptation was not in that direction.
Perhaps the devil that inhabits you is avarice, a more respectable vice. You grind the faces of the poor. You have an infernal clutch for the throat of the unfortunate. There is no more mercy in your heart than there is grace in a lion’s paw or a rattlesnake’s tooth; and though your sin does not bring upon you so much of social opprobrium as the conduct of the man whom you condemn, I do not know but that your sin in the sight of God is as loathsome and damnable as his. He surrendered to one temptation; you surrendered to another.
Do not say in boasting, “I never could have done such a thing as that!” You don’t know what you would do if sufficiently tempted. You have an infinite soul-force. If grace direct it, a force for the right; if evil influences seize upon it, a terrific force for the wrong. There are passions within your soul that have never been unchained, Look out if once they slip their cables!
In our criticisms of others let us remember that we have faults which our friends have to excuse. How much would be left of us if all those who see inconsistencies in us should clip away from our character and reputation? It is an invariable rule that those who make the roughest work with the names of others are those who have themselves the most imperfections. The larger the beam in your own eye, the more anxious are you about the mote in somebody else’s eye. Instead of going about town slashing this man’s bad temper and the other man’s falsity, and this woman’s hypocrisy and that one’s indiscretion, go home with the ten commandments as a monitor, and make out a list of your own derelictions. The best way to keep a whole city clean is for every housekeeper to scrub her own doorsteps.
Our mode of deciding upon others will be the mode which others will employ in deciding upon us. A harsh man, with cast-iron criticisms, will some day meet cast iron. You flay others, and others will flay you. Let one of these merciless critics of character, overcome by temptation, some day step a little out of the right path, and he will find himself in hail-storms of denunciation. You have not the entire monopoly of spikes, and goads, and pincers. “With what measure ye mete it shall be measured to you again.”
More than all, we ought to be induced away from all harshness by the fact that we ourselves are to be brought into high tribunal at the last, and that he shall have judgment without mercy that hath shown no mercy. You who are accustomed with rough grip violently to shake men for their misdeeds, waiting for no palliations and listening to no appeals, what will become of you when, at last, with all your imperfections, you appear at the bar of your Maker?