As easy is it to discern the mote in a brother’s eye as to discern the face of the sky. Hypocrite is the term by which the facile discerner in either case is divinely stigmatised; in the one instance, because with all his discernment he cannot read the signs of the times; in the other, because with all his insight and microscopic nicety of perception, and exceptionally developed faculty of vision, he yet considers not the beam that is in his own eye.

With our Lord’s words concerning the mote and the beam, Archbishop Trench bids us compare the Chinese proverb, “Sweep away the snow from thine own door, and heed not the frost upon thy neighbour’s tiles.” The Greek and Latin classics are not wanting in various readings of the same theme. Demosthenes meant much the same thing when he said that we must beware of austerely scrutinizing the actions of others, unless first we are conscious of having acquitted ourselves aright: “οὐ γὰρ ἐστι πικρῶς ἐξετάσαι τι πέπρακται τοῖς ἀλλοῖς, ἀν μὴ παῤ ὑμῶν ἀυτῶν πρῶτον ὑπάρξη τὰ δέοντα.” “Man is blind to his own faults, but keen-sighted to perceive those of others,” is a Latin adage: “Vitiis suis pervidendis cæcus est homo, in alienis perspicax.” “Is it never your way to look at yourself when you are abusing another?” is a question in Plautus: “Non soles respicere te, cum dicas injuste alteri?” Cicero pronounces it to be of the nature of folly to see the faults of others, and to forget one’s own: “Proprium est stultitiæ aliorum vitia cernere, oblivisci suorum.” Horace shrewdly submits that the man who is desirous that his friends should not take offence at his own protuberances, will “ignore” that friend’s warts:

And at least as pointed and piquant is the passage beginning,

The query Plautus puts, “How is it that no man tries to search into himself, but each fixes his eyes on the wallet of the one who goes before him?” is in allusion to the fable of Jupiter having loaded men with a couple of wallets; the one, filled with our own vices, being slung at our backs,

the other, heavy with our neighbour’s faults, hung in front,

To pardon those absurdities in ourselves which we cannot suffer in others, is neither better nor worse, says Dean Swift, than to be more willing to be fools ourselves than to have others so. The proverbs of all nations show all nations to be alive to the ridiculous in this respect. The kiln calls the oven, burnt house, says one. In Italy, the pan says to the pot, Keep off, or you’ll smutch me. In Spain, the raven bawls hoarsely to the crow, Get out, blackamoor! (Quítate allá, negro!) In Germany, one ass nicknames another, Long-ears. And Dr. Trench is rather taken with a certain originality in the Catalan version of the proverb: “Death said to the man with his throat cut, ‘How ugly you look!’” They should be fair, hints Juvenal, who venture to deride the disproportioned leg or sooty hide, Loripedem rectus derideat, Æthiopem albus. Yet, as the Ettrick shepherd once sang in his native Doric:—

Molière’s Chrysale twits her sister Bélise, who is a femme savante, with snapping up everybody short who makes a slip with the tongue, while herself liable to graver censure for slips of conduct:—

Sappho, again, in Mademoiselle de Scudéry’s portentous romance—once the rage of readers in France, despite its plurality of volumes, as “Clarissa” was in England, a century later—ridicules the bizarre orthography of the fine-ladyism of the day, while amused at the fact that the fine ladies in question, who perpetrated such gross errors in writing, and who lost every particle of wit the moment they took up a pen, would yet make game for days together of some poor foreigner who happened to use one term for another. As if it were less a matter of mirth or marvel for a grande dame, claiming to be a woman of wit, too, and a power in society, to commit a thousand blunders in writing her native language, than for a raw foreigner to make a few slips in speaking it.

We every day and every hour, observes Montaigne, say things of another that we might more properly say of ourselves, could we but revert our observation to our own concerns as well as extend it to others. And the old essayist has his fling at not a few authors of the day who, in this manner, prejudiced their own cause by running headlong upon those they attacked, and darting those shafts against their enemies that might, with much greater propriety and effect, be hurled back at themselves.

A stanza in the most elaborate of Shakspeare’s poems that are not plays—for are not all his plays poems?—runs into this eloquence of remonstrant appeal:—

It is of their common friend Breuning that Beethoven writes to Ferdinand Ries,—“He certainly possesses many admirable qualities, but he thinks himself quite faultless, whereas the very defects that he discovers in others are those which he possesses himself to the highest degree.” One of the most natural and truthfully, as well as forcibly, drawn characters in Mrs. Inchbald’s “Simple Story,”—Sandford,—a man of understanding, of learning, and a complete casuist, yet all whose faults were committed for the want of knowing better, is described as constantly reproving faults in others, and most assuredly too good a man not to have corrected and amended his own, had they been known to him; but known to him they were not. He had been, we are told, for so long a time the spiritual superior or preceptor of all with whom he lived, and so busied with instructing others, that he had not once recollected that he needed instruction himself; and in such awe did his habitual severity keep all about him, that although he had numerous friends, not one of them told him of his failing. “Was there not then some reason for him to suppose he had no faults? His enemies, indeed, hinted that he had; but enemies he never hearkened to; and thus, with all his good sense, he wanted the sense to follow the rule, ‘Believe what your enemies say of you rather than what is said by your friends.’” He had yet to learn, and to learn by heart, the wide and practical import of the prayer—

Well may the demoniac guide of Don Cleofas, in Le Sage’s symbolical fiction, say, and well does he say, “J’admire messieurs les hommes; leurs propres défauts leur paraissent des minuties, au lieu qu’ils regardent ceux d’autrui avec un microscope.” To their own faults more than a little blind, to those of others they are not a little unkind.

Gay begins his fable of the Turkey and the Ant with the smoothly-turned truism, that

One of the most classical masters of modern English, whether in verse or prose, was employing the same metre—of fatal facility, as it is called—when he closed his address to a brother bard in a strain that must also close this chapter of instances: