it is thrown, and
returning to smite the man that threw it.

This is a strange reversal of the common notion in which we think of
our relation to other lives. We fancy that another life is perfectly
interpretable in its motives and aims, but that our own lives are much
disguised; whereas the fact is that nothing is more mysterious and
baffling than the interior purposes of another soul, and nothing is
more self-disclosed and transparent than the nature of a judging life.
One man goes through the world and finds it suspicious, inclined to
wrong-doing, full of capacity for evil, and he judges it with his ready
gossip of depreciation. He may be in all this reporting what is true,
or he may be stating what is untrue; but one truth he is reporting with
entire precision,--the fact that he is himself a suspicious and
ungenerous man; and this disclosure of his own heart, which, if another
hinted at it, he would resent, he is without any disguise making of his
own accord. The cynic looks over the world and finds it hopelessly
bad, but the one obvious fact is not that the world is all bad, but
that the man is a cynic. The snob looks over the world and finds it
hopelessly {34} vulgar, but the fact is not that the world is all
vulgar, but that the man is a snob. The gentleman walks his way
through the world, anticipating just dealing, believing in his
neighbor, expecting responsiveness to honor, considerateness,
high-mindedness, and he is often deceived and finds his confidence
misplaced, and sometimes discovers ruffians where he thought there were
gentlemen; but this at least he has proved,--that he himself is a
gentleman. Through his judgment of others he is himself judged, and as
he has measured to others, so, in the final judgment of him, made
either by God or men, it shall be measured to him again.

{35}

XIII

THE INCIDENTAL

_Luke_ xvii. 5-15.

"As they went, they were healed." The cure of these sick men was not
only remarkable in itself, but still more remarkable because of the way
in which it happened. They came to Jesus crying: "Master, have mercy
on us," and He sends them to the priest that they might show themselves
to him and get his official guarantee that they were no longer lepers.
So they must have expected that the cure, if it was to come at all,
would happen either under the hands of Jesus before they started, or
under the hands of the high priest after they arrived. But it did not
come i