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I. YOUR OWN CHARACTER AND HABITS.

1. Remember that you have the very same feelings which led to those faults you usually rail at, to their vices whose vices you condemn. Did vanity lead them to folly? that same vanity dwells with you. Did pride overthrow them? pride dwells royally with you. Did selfishness make them mean? are not you selfish? Did their appetites seduce them? are not those same seducers at work in your bosom?

2. But there is an additional reason for forbearing uncharitable censures in the multitude of your actual overt transgressions. They may not, to be sure, be of the same kind as those which you unfeelingly reprehend. Are they slovens? Perhaps you are wasters. They may be fickle whom you blame, you may be obstinate. If we looked as sharply at ourselves as we do at censured persons we might find their faults matched in every point in ourselves.

3. Even this, however, does not exhaust the point in hand. For in weighing relative guilt circumstances are always to be considered. Men may be so situated that a foible will be less excusable in them than a vice in others. While you freely rail at all around you perhaps God is putting you down, with all your proud morality, as the less excusable creature of the two. You may have a better mind, you may have been better trained, you may have been better educated, you may be in better circumstances, you may be surrounded by the influence of better associates, you may have ten restraints to others' one, they may have ten temptations to your one.

4. The fourth particular is the remembrance of our past mischiefs as a motive for leniency of judgment.

II. THE INDIGNATION EXPERIENCED IN VIEW OF EVIL IS IN A LARGE PROPORTION OF CASES SELFISH, AND SOMETIMES HYPOCRITICAL AND DETESTABLE, IN THE SIGHT OF GOD. I suppose that the feeling of condemnation is frequently more wicked than the thing condemned.

1. The first bill purporting to be a true indignation at evil has the plainest marks of a clumsy counterfeit. The feeling has no respect whatever to the moral qualities of the evil it chastises. It is simply an outcry raised to contrast our own excellences with the censured evil. Some men inveigh against squandering because they are economical. Some rail at parsimony because they are open handed. Some cry out at indolence that men may note their industry.

2. On the success of this device may issue another counterfeit of moral indignation. They are clamorous against evildoers to hide the fact that they themselves are such.

3. Vociferous indignation is not unfrequently the mere creation of fashion and of sympathy with bad feelings. Each clamours because all the rest do.

4. A seeming virtuous indignation is often only an ebullition of wounded pride and vanity. Is there a misstep from virtue? The guardian angel weeps, mercy flies swiftly to the penitent, and Christ says, "Neither do I condemn thee, only go, and sin no more." Not thus do fellow mortals of like passions. All the slights and petty offences, all the ignoble strifes of envy and sensitive vanity, are raked out of the embers, and the bitter taunt is but the revenge of these covered with the garb of virtue. A hated rival is down, a haughty head a little higher than mine is in the dust, superior beauty is humbled, the wearer of better clothes, the recipient of more pointed attentions, the immovable rival, the one who once said this or that of me — these are the real archers lurking in the ambush of virtuous or religious indignation which bend the bow and infix the venomous shaft.

5. Revenge is almost invariably cloaked under the guise of moral indignation. And of this, as of almost all that I have mentioned, it may be said, the uncharitableness of the censor is often more malignantly guilty than the offence of the sinner.

III. REASONS AGAINST CENSORIOUSNESS AND UNCHARITABLENESS SPRINGING OUT OF THE FEELINGS AND AFFECTIONS OF THE VICTIM.

1. Severity exercised without pity tends to provoke rather than reform the transgressor. That man is the most influential against vice who, to a hearty abhorrence of it, adds a cordial desire to rescue the evildoer. Uncharitableness promotes evil, while pity reforms it.

2. Then, me thinks, our pity should flow out with our indignation in view of the sufferings often of those whom we scourge. There is something peculiarly touching in that vice and crime which prevail among the ignorant and neglected. Multitudes have had no childhood instruction. Others have been too fatally taught by renegade parents. Look in, then, upon the motley throng of ignorant and vicious. Are they happy? Does the fulness of the cup of pleasure take away the necessity of pity from you? Of all the sun shines on, none need pity more than those whose career of vice and crime is near to its close. Suffering has made every feature haggard, and there is war in every limb, anguish in every nerve, and groaning at every bone. Want torments them. Their own demoniac passions scorch them.

(H. W. Beecher.)

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KJV: But the end of all things is at hand: be ye therefore sober, and watch unto prayer.

WEB: But the end of all things is near. Therefore be of sound mind, self-controlled, and sober in prayer.