Censoriousness - What It Is
Censoriousness is composed of self-conceit and severity; a self-conceit that we are superior to others, and are entitled to some sort of lordship over them; and then a severity of judging others by the outward letter of righteousness instead of by the Spirit. There are other people who are censorious besides Christians, but it does not look so conspicuous in their lives, for it is the very nature of religion to make a streak of badness look more ugly.
Censoriousness has a special facility of fastening itself on a religious person, and on persons professing a great deal of religion, and its very intensity is in the proportion to the intensity of religious zeal, and seems to find its greenest pastures in those who profess the perfection of love.
It is a parasite which, like the mistletoe, fastens itself on the tree of religion, and seeks to spread itself until it claims to be the tree, and, in fact, if not killed off, will succeed in killing the tree, which, indeed, it often does.
There seem to be certain weaknesses, and ugly, disagreeable infirmities, latent in the soul that nothing even develops till he becomes religious, and sometimes the more intense the religion the more glaring are these infirmities. There is nothing disagreeable in handling a piece of dry wood, but if you undertake to make the wood pass into a live coal of fire then will develop the unpleasant concomitant of smoke, and soot, and ashes, which would never have been known but for the process of burning, and there is something like this in the soul’s transition from a state of nature to that of the pure, burning love of God, and though all souls do not manifest the same disagreeable things, yet, as God’s grace is burning us through, it seems inevitable that there will be a smoke in the shape of some religious infirmity.
Censoriousness is not grace, but is assumes the profession of grace, and oftentimes of great sanctity, and it seems to develop in some characters only when they are really under the operations of grace, as an iceberg throws off a heavy fog when it comes near the Gulf stream. One thing is certain, that many professors of very high grace are very censorious, and they were never very censorious until some time after their declaration of entire yielding to God. Perhaps we can never understand the metaphysics of it, but we know it is a delusion of Satan to get religious people to mistake censoriousness for sanctity. One of the remedies against it is a clear understanding of what it is.
Watson goes on to describe the following characteristics of a censorious person.
- A Wrong Standard
- A Fake Calling
- An Unfruitful Life
- An Unhappy Life
HT:DW
Technorati Tags: judging
No comments:
Post a Comment