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If the question be asked, How can a presumed criminal be his own judge? the answer lies in the constitution of the human soul. Every man has within him a faculty which discharges by turns all the offices of a court of justice. Conscience is the counsel for the prosecution; it collects the evidences of guilt, sets them out, weighs their value, marshals them in their separate and collective strength, urges the conclusion to which they point. But conscience is also the counsel for the defence. Although outside the court, it stands by no means alone. It is assisted, often to its great embarrassment, by three uninvited and very importunate junior counsel, who are very nearly relate to each other — self-love, and self-conceit, and self-assertion. But yet, even on the side of the defence, conscience may sometimes have something honest and substantial to urge against the prima facie aspect of the case for the prosecution. And then, having concluded the case for the prosecution and the case for the defendant, conscience weighs out and balances the conflicting statements by a debate within itself after the fashion of a jury, as though it had many voices, but a single mind, And, once more, conscience, being thus warder, and counsel on both sides, and jury, cloths itself at last in the higher majesty of justice, ascends the seat of judgment, and pronounces the sentence of the Divine law; and when that sentence is a sentence of condemnation, and has been clearly uttered within the soul, the soul knows no peace until it has sought and found some certificate of pardon from the supreme Authority which conscience represents. Self-judgment in the sense recommended by the apostle is not as easy a process as might at first appear. It has several obstacles, several enemies to encounter who have long made themselves at home in human nature, who are certain to do their best against it. And of these the first is a want of entire sincerity, and this involves a charge, the justice of which will be always disputed, but especially when it is made against the temper and disposition of men of our own time; for, probably, there is one thing on which we pride ourselves as characterising us more than the generations who have preceded us — it is that we are the devotees of truth. It might seem that we had taken as our own the old Homeric motto, "Let us have light, even if we perish in it," so strong is this passion for truth, so seemingly noble, so far-reaching, so actively at work in all directions, whether of public or of private life, around us! But is our passion for truth equally ardent in all directions? — is there not one quarter in which we shrink from indulging it? Is it not often the case that while we are eager to know everything, even the worst, about public affairs and the affairs of our neighbours, about persons high in state, and about our humblest acquaintances, there is one state of affairs, and there is one person about which the great majority of us is often content to be very ignorant indeed? A second enemy to a true self-judgment is moral cowardice. Observe, I say moral cowardice — a very different thing from physical. The man who could head a storming party without a minute's hesitation is not always willing to meet his true self. If the truth is to be told, are not a great many of us like those country folk who are afraid of crossing a churchyard path after nightfall, lest they should see a ghost behind a tombstone? Our consciences are but cemeteries, in which dead memories are buried close to or upon each other in forgotten confusion. Some of you may have noticed an account of the conduct of a distinguished and learned Englishman who nearly lost his life in Egypt a short time ago. He was travelling in order to prosecute his favourite studies, and was returning to his boat on the Nile, after examining some antiquities in the neighbourhood, when he trod by chance on a cerastes — a snake of the species one of which, nineteen centuries ago, ended the life of the fallen Cleopatra. When he felt that he had been bitten, and a moment's glance had shown him the deadly reptile, he lost not a moment in making his way to the boat, which was, happily, only a few yards distant. He called for a hot iron, and then, with his own hands, he applied it to the wound, holding it there until he had burnt out the poisoned flesh down to the very bone. "Had you acted with less decision," so said a distinguished physician to him on his return to Cairo, "your life must have been forfeited." With matters of conscience we, it seems, are less capable of heroism, though a great deal more is really at stake. A third enemy to a true self-judgment is the lack of perseverance. As we are constantly being tempted, and often yielding more or less to temptation, we should be constantly bringing ourselves to the bar of conscience, which is the bar of God. Unless we take care, the determination to persevere, to be true to ourselves, is likely to become weaker and more intermittent as our natural faculties decay with the progress of time. Much will take place within which will never have been reviewed on this side the grave. There have been sovereigns of earthly realms — such as the Roman Emperor Hadrian, and the Caliph Haroun Alraschid — whose senses of the responsibility of empire have been such as to compel them to do more than official duty would prescribe, to inspect their dominions and to visit their subjects as far as they could personally, perhaps in disguise, and so to relieve distress and to encourage meritorious efforts, and to correct injustice, and to promote well-being and prosperity, and thus to strengthen the defences of the Empire, and remove the motives to insurrection and disorder. And if a man, as a Christian, should be absolute ruler within and over his own body, if his conscience is true, he best self-governs as well as reigns if it does not hold its office merely at the good pleasure of a democracy of passions, each of which is playing for its own hand, and which collectively may proclaim a republic:in the soul to-morrow morning, and send their present ruler about his business — no doubt with a pension. If, I say, a triumph of all the forces of moral disorder is not to take place within the human soul, its ruler must be constantly inspecting it, constantly judging it, that he may finish his royal course with joy, and arrest the stern judgment that must else await him by thus constantly anticipating it. The motive for this self-judgment follows — "We should not be judged if we would judge ourselves." Does this mean that a man who deals truly and severely with himself may always expect to escape human criticism? This is only very partially true. It is true, no doubt, that so far as we judge ourselves in matters which affect our intercourse with others, endeavouring to bring that intercourse into strict accord with the principles and the terms of the law of Christ, we shall diminish the opportunities for hostile criticism on this score. In this sense self-judgment brings with it in this world its own reward. In whatever degree we cultivate self-discipline — the sincere, pure, humble, kindly, patient temper which is prescribed by the teaching of our Lord Jesus Christ — in that degree we diminish the friction with our brother men in the struggle of our own common life, and so we escape the judgments which such friction provokes. But it does not follow that those who judge themselves severely are thereby always excepted from the unfavourable judgments of other men, for a very large number of men not only pass judgments upon the words and acts of others of which they can take some sort of cognisance, but also, and, strange to say, with equal confidence, upon the motive and secret characters of others, of which, from the nature of the case, they can have no real knowledge whatever. Added to which the great majority of men resent, perhaps almost unconsciously, a higher standard of life and conduct than their own. When one of the greatest of the heathen set himself to consider what would happen if a really perfect man were to appear upon the earth, his decision was an unconscious prophecy. "Men," he said, "would put such a man to death." Men who are not themselves holy are impatient of holiness, and pass hard judgments, if they can do nothing more, on those who aim at it; and thus it has happened that all the great servants of God, although judging themselves severely, have been again and again judged by their fellowmen with much greater severity. So it has been with nearly all the finest characters in the Church of Christ. They have passed their lives constantly under a storm of calumny and insult, and only when they have left the world have they been recognised as having been what they were. Nor is this wonderful in the case of those who at their very best only approached perfection, if it was also true in His case who alone was perfect. A man, then, who judges himself severely cannot on that account expect to disarm human judgments; but he may do much more: he may anticipate, and by anticipating he may arrest, the judgments of God, for the judgments of God light not on all sinners, but only on unrepentant sinners; and self-judgment is the effect and expression of penitence — it is the effort of the soul to be true to the highest law of its own being, which is also the law of its Creator. Self-judgment. shows us what we are. It does not of itself enable us to become other than we are; it does not of itself confer pardon for the past or strength to do better in the time to come. It bids us look out of and beyond ourselves to a Divine compassion which is also a Divine justice, which, if we will, we can, by that complete and whole-hearted adhesion of the soul to truth, which the Bible calls faith, make in reality and for ever our own. It makes a man pray at once more intelligently and more earnestly — more intelligently because when he has had himself up for a strict judicial investigation at the bar of his conscience he knows what he needs, not in a vague way, but in detail, and precisely instead of complaining to God in general terms of the corruption of his fallen nature — a complaint which makes him in his own estimate not worse than any of his neighbours — he lays his finger upon certain acts of evil which he, and he only, so far as he knows, has committed. He prays as for his life, and when his prayer is crowned with victory he understands what he owes to having judged himself honestly, and how, having judged himself, he will not, through God's mercy, be judged as an unrepentant sinner at the last.

(Canon Liddon.)

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KJV: For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.

WEB: For this cause many among you are weak and sickly, and not a few sleep.