These words, my dear brethren, are taken from the Gospel of the first Sunday after Pentecost, which is always read at the end of Mass on this day. Of all those which our Divine Lord spoke during his ministry on earth, there are none more practical, none which have a more immediate bearing on our daily lives. {285} There is nothing which shows the perversity of our fallen nature more clearly than the common habit, in which even many persons who are pious in their way continually indulge, of criticising and commenting on the actions and character of others. Some people, indeed, seem to think that there is no harm in talking about the character and conduct of their neighbors, as long as they do not say anything which is not true. This is a great mistake; one hardly needs to stop and reflect for a moment to see that it is a grievous injustice to speak of a sin which another person has actually committed, if it be not known, or at least certain soon to be known in some other way, by the one to whom we speak. So there are many who have sense enough not to make this mistake and who do hold their tongues about the secret sins of others. But there are comparatively few who seem to realize that it is against charity, though not against justice, to speak even of well-known and evident faults of one's neighbors, when there is no good object to be gained by so doing; and, in fact, even to think of them and turn them over in one's mind, for which there can never be any good object. It is to such as these--and there are hosts of them--that our Lord's words are addressed. He does not himself answer the question which he asks in the text; but there is not much difficulty in our answering it ourselves. {286} "Why," then, "seest thou the mote in thy brother's eye, but the beam in thy own eye thou considerest not?" The two always go together. You will always find that just in proportion to a person's watchfulness about others' faults is his carelessness about his own. Why, I say, do you do so? Let us try to find out. Are you so sensitive about your neighbor's faults because they offend God? No, I do not believe that is the reason. If it were you would be a great deal more troubled about your own than you are. If you really cared for God's honor in the matter you would go to work on your own sins, which you really can amend, and not on those of your neighbors, which you only carp at but do not even try to correct. Do not pretend, then, that your habit of finding fault with others comes from a desire that God may be better served. Such a pretence would be only hypocrisy. It is especially to such pretenders that our Saviour says: "Hypocrite, cast first the beam out of thy own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to take out the mote from thy brother's eye."