Precept & Practice – MAY 14 – Judging

There is nothing that needs so much patience as just judgment of a man, or even of one act of a man.   We ought to know his education, the circumstances of his life, the friends he has made or lost, his temperament, his daily work, the motives which filled the act, the health he had at the time, the books he was reading, the temptations of his youth – we ought to have the knowledge of God to judge him justly;  and God is the only judge of a man.   It is only love which makes us take pains with a man.   Just judgment must then be slow, and one mark of unjust judgment is its haste.

Reverend Stopford A. Brooke

What is not needful and is commonly wrong, namely, is to pass a judgment on our fellow-creatures.   Never let it be forgotten that there is scarcely a single moral action of a single man of which other men can have such a knowledge in its ultimate grounds, its surrounding incidents, and the real determining causes of its merits, as to warrant their pronouncing a conclusive judgment upon it.

W. E. Gladstone

oooOOOooo

From the Introduction to Precept and Practice

The kindly welcome given to my other little books, ‘Being and Doing’ and ‘Character and Conduct,’ must be my excuse for adding another collection of extracts to the number now in circulation.

The quotations are gathered from the books of many earnest thinkers, and deal with Life in all its length and breadth, with ourselves, our characters, our plain unvarnished faults and weaknesses, our often untoward circumstances, and with all that drags us down;-  with our purposes, our religion, our love and friendships, and with all that uplifts us;-  with our relation to others, our influence and responsibilities, and finally with those stages of our journey which bring us to the Road’s Last Turn and to the Silent Land.

CONSTANCE  M. WHISHAW