Less monstrous, less revolting to belief,
More to be pitied, more to be forgiven.”
As one of George Eliot’s good parsons has it, God sees us as we are altogether, not in separate feelings or actions, as our fellow-men see us. We are always doing each other injustice, and thinking better or worse of each other than we deserve, he says, because we only hear and see separate words and actions—not each other’s whole nature. Do not philosophic doctors tell us, again, the reflective author in person elsewhere muses, that we are unable to discern so much as a tree, except by an unconscious cunning which combines many past and separate sensations; that no one sense is independent of another, so that in the dark we can hardly taste a fricassee, or tell whether our pipe is alight or not, and the most intelligent boy, if accommodated with claws or hoofs instead of fingers, would be likely to remain on the lowest form? If so, it is easy to understand that our discernment of men’s motives must depend on the completeness of the elements we can bring from our own susceptibility and our own experience. “See to it, friend, before you pronounce a too hasty judgment, that your own moral sensibilities are not of a hoofed or clawed character.” For, as this penetrating writer insists, in continuation of the metaphor, the keenest eye will not serve, unless you have the delicate fingers, with their subtile nerve filaments, which elude scientific lenses, and lose themselves in the invisible world of human sensations.
Deeds which, to quote another popular though less powerful penwoman, our acquaintance designate our follies, may at another tribunal be our virtues—our single redeeming points; who judges rightly, who can rightly judge, where so many of our efforts are bent to seem other than we are, and the universal conjuring trick of this world is to throw dust expertly in our neighbours’ eyes?
Centuries ago, well-nigh two score, it was written by the most philosophic, and perhaps the best, of Roman emperors, that men’s actions look worse than they are; and, says he, “one must be thoroughly informed of a great many things before one can be rightly qualified to give judgment in the case.” The sceptic Bayle was a better Christian than Scaliger, when he protested against the assertion of that peremptory scholar that Bellarmin did not believe a word of what he wrote, and was at heart an atheist: besides the testimony of Bellarmin’s life and deathbed to the contrary, such judgments are, said Bayle (and no friend to the Jesuits he), a usurpation of the rights of One who alone is the Judge of hearts, and before whom there is no dissembling.
An apostle’s reason given for the counsel, Speak not evil one of another, brethren,—is this: that whoso speaketh evil of his brother, and judgeth his brother, speaketh evil of the law, and judgeth the law. Now, there is one Lawgiver, who is able to save and to destroy; who art thou that judgest another?
“Oh what are we,
Frail creatures as we are, that we should sit
In judgment man on man! and what were we,
If the All-merciful should mete to us