JUDGE NOT | AdventAI

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Nov 6, 1901

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 27, No. 45.

JUDGE NOT.

INSTANTANEOUS photographs show the graceful trotting horse, or flying bird, or leaping hound, in apparently clumsy, awkward, and unnatural attitudes. Instantaneous judgments—judgments of men or of the actions of men—may be just as misleading. Many a busy Christian worker indeed suffers from just such injustice, incomplete representation of his actions becoming misrepresented.

We seldom have the right to judge another by a single action of his, in ignorance of his object ahead, and of his motives behind. We seldom do well to paint a fellow-being from an instantaneous photograph. We are seldom justified in deciding, from an instant’s glimpse of shadows on another life, that that life is all darkness, or is even tending toward darkness. There is a twilight of the morning, as well as of the evening. Those shadows may be tokens of the fading night, instead of the fading day. Up from darkness of early surroundings, sinful habits, wrong teaching, or neglect of teaching, or years of indifference, the soul beside us may be even now painfully struggling into the light.

Let us not criticize; let us help. Let us look more at direction than at instantaneous position; more at the general trend than at the occasional deviation. Two points, at least, are required to determine the direction of even an ideally straight line. Shall we decide the direction of a wavering human life by the single point of a single action?—Sunday School Times.