To begin, there is the famous description of the Last Judgement (Matt. 25:31-46)—­a description in itself not altogether new.  Plenty of writers and thinkers had described the scene, and the broad outlines of the picture were naturally common property; yet it is to these more or less conventional traits that attention has often been too exclusively devoted.  Jesus, however, altered the whole character of the Judgement Day scene by his account of the principles on which the Judge decides the cases brought before him.  On the right hand of the Judge are—­not the Jews confronting the Gentiles on the left—­nor exactly the well-conducted and well-balanced people who get there in Greek allegories—­but a group of men and women who realize where they are with a gasp of surprise.  How has it come about?  The Judge tells them:  “I was an hungered and ye gave me meat,” and the rest of the familiar words.  But this does not quite settle the question.  Embarrassment rises on their faces—­is it a mistake?  One of them speaks for the rest:  “Lord, when saw we thee an hungered and fed thee?” They do not remember it.  There is something characteristic there of the whole school of Jesus; these people are “children of fact,” honest as their Master, and they will not accept heaven in virtue of a possible mistake.  And it appears from the Judge’s answer that such instinctive deeds go further than men think, even if they are forgotten.  Wordsworth speaks of the “little nameless unremembered acts of kindness and of love” that are “the best portion of a good man’s life."[29] The acts of kindness were forgotten just because they were instinctive, but, Jesus emphasizes the point, they are decisive; they come, as another of his telling phrases suggests, from “the overflow of the heart,” and they reveal it.  With the people on the left hand it was the other way.  They were fairly well in possession of their good records, but they had missed the decisive fact—­they were instinctively hard.  Such people Jesus warns.  So familiar are his words that there is a danger of our limiting them to their first obvious meaning.  Eighty years ago Thomas Carlyle looked out on the England he knew, and remarked that it was strange that the great battle of civilized man should be still the battle of the savage against famine, and with that he observed that the people were “needier than ever of inward sustenance.”  Is there a warning in this picture of the people on the left hand that applies to deeper things than physical hunger?  A warning to those who do not heed another’s need of “inward sustenance,” of spiritual life, of God?  It looks likely.  Otherwise there is a risk of our declining upon a “Social Righteousness” that falls a long way short of John the Baptist’s, and does less for any soul, our own or another’s.