On Judging Others (part 2)

The following are more insights from Frederick Faber as found in Paul Billheimer's book, Love Covers, on the topic of judging others. The first two points summarized from last week's post are:

1.  It is a universal law that when we judge others, whether individuals or multitudes, we come to erroneous conclusions from the mere fact that we naturally judge over-harshly.

2.  Severity is one of the natural accompaniments of a young and immature state of grace. 

3.  When we see evil in others, we never can see the amount of inward resistance which the person has given to the evil, or the amount of humiliation and sorrow which they may have for their own failures and defects. The violence of temptation is always invisible, and its peculiar oppressiveness, owing to heredity, or education, or previous modes of living, can never be estimated by a fellow creature. There are depths of invincible ignorance...which every human character has in some one or more direction, and it is almost universally true that even among good religious people there is one point of moral excellence upon which they seem stupid...In judging others we fail to see how many odd crossings there are in people's minds, which tell upon their motives and hamper the free action of their moral sense. Much sin lies at the door of a warped mind, but how much guilt there is in the sin can be known to God alone. The heart is the jewel that He covets for His crown, and if the habitual attitude of the heart is better than any particular action which we see, God be praised for it.

4. The evil in our fellows strikes us with bold startling proportions, whereas goodness is more quiet and hidden, and often passes unobserved...It must be observed that evil, of its own nature, is more visible than goodness...The evil we see, or think we see, in others is easily recognized, but often the people we are judging are more keenly alive to their defects than we imagine and may grieve over them in secret...God has so contrived the moral world that the greater part of goodness must of necessity be hidden like Himself...