This spirit is always accompanied by ignorance of one’s own faults, which makes him who indulges in it ludicrous.  So our Lord would seem to intend by the figure of the mote and the beam.  It takes a great deal of close peering to see a mote; but the censorious man sees only the mote, and sees it out of scale.  No matter how bright the eye, though it be clear as a hawk’s, its beauty is of no moment to him.  The mote magnified, and nothing but the mote, is his object; and he calls this one-sided exaggeration ‘criticism,’ and prides himself on the accuracy of his judgment.  He makes just the opposite mistake in his estimate of his own faults, if he sees them at all.  We look at our neighbour’s errors with a microscope, and at our own through the wrong end of a telescope.  We see neither in their real magnitude, and the former mistake is sure to lead to the latter.  We have two sets of weights and measures:  one for home use, the other for foreign.  Every vice has two names; and we call it by its flattering and minimising one when we commit it, and by its ugly one when our neighbour does it.  Everybody can see the hump on his friend’s shoulders, but it takes some effort to see our own.  David was angry enough at the man who stole his neighbour’s ewe lamb, but quite unaware that he was guilty of a meaner, crueller theft.  The mote can be seen; but the beam, big though it is, needs to be ‘considered.’  So it often escapes notice, and will surely do so, if we are yielding to the temptation of harsh judgment of others.  Every one may be aware of faults of his own very much bigger than any that he can see in another, for each of us may fathom the depth of our own sinfulness in motive and unspoken, unacted thought, while we can see only the surface acts of others.

Our Lord points out, in verse 4, a still more subtle form of this harsh judgment, when it assumes the appearance of solicitude for the improvement of others, and He thus teaches us that all honest desire to help in the moral reformation of our neighbours must be preceded by earnest efforts at mending our own conduct.  If we have grave faults of our own undetected and unconquered, we are incapable either of judging or of helping our brethren.  Such efforts will be hypocritical, for they pretend to come from genuine zeal for righteousness and care for another’s good, whereas their real root is simply censorious exaggeration of a neighbour’s faults; they imply that the person affected with such a tender care for another’s eyes has his own in good condition.  A blind guide is bad enough, but a blind oculist is a still more ridiculous anomaly.  Note, too, that the result of clearing our own vision is beautifully put as being, not ability to see, but ability to cure, our fellows.  It is only the experience of the pain of casting out a darling evil, and the consciousness of God’s pitying mercy as given to us, that makes the eye keen enough, and the hand steady and gentle enough, to pull out the mote.  It is a delicate operation, and one which a clumsy operator may make very painful, and useless, after all.  A rough finger or a harsh spirit makes success impossible.