Seems about time to delve into the Great Quotes file again:
"God himself, sir, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days." –Samuel Johnson
Who was Samuel Johnson?
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If you like this quote and are eager for more Johnsonian wisdom, check out The Samuel Johnson Sound Bite Page.
Browsing through the site, I found another gem of Johnson’s:
"A man of genius has been seldom ruined but by himself."
Author: Jimmy Akin
Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."
View all posts by Jimmy Akin
If you check the “Sound Bite” page, you’ll notice that the first quote is in dispute as to whether he ever said it. It comes from Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People.”
It is a great quote, though…
Interesting quote. The implication that we should not be quick to judge others is quite true of couse, but I wonder about the truth of the statement itself.
Does God really refrain from judging a person until his or her death? Is it even possible for God who knows every detail of a person’s interior and exterior life, and who is entirely just and understanding, not to “judge” the person’s moral/spiritual status? Is it possible for him to have mercy on someone if he has not “first” judged the person to be guilty?
I would propose that God judges all people at all times, loving them and offering them mercy with that judgment that they are in need of mercy. If they refuse and die without real love for God then the judgment of their soul at that point becomes the perminant judgment, since the soul is now incapable of growing in love for God. This “moment” after death we call the first or the particular judgment, but I would think it just a continuation of the constant judgment of God. What has changed is whether you can grow or shrink in love or not, so the judgment now reflects what your permanent status will be.
Of course we humans have limited knowledge of a person’s exterior life and essentially nothing about their interior life, so we can never judge someone in this life, unless perhaps we are given a sort of private revelation about it like Padre Pio and some other priest-saints seem to have sometimes been given.
J.R. Stoodley, I was thinking the same thing regarding that first quote. There is a lot of judging brought onto still-then-living people in both the old and the new testaments. See Ezekiel, and the first part of Revelation. Jesus also did quite a lot of verbal chastizing and none of this judging had anyting to do with a final judgment.
It also seems necessary in two NT passages that we are to do a *little* bit of judging in order to obey Christ’s words. We have to determine whether someone is a swine before we know we can’t cast our pearls before them. We have to determine whether someone is hardened to truth before wipe the dust from our feet. We will be sheep among wolves at times; that some will reject us who are in fact rejecting Jesus.
We are told not to be hypocritical, not to completely refrain from making any kind of determination about someone (judgment) whatsoever. We judge lest we not be judged–perhaps in the form of a final condemnation of somene–but we can also point out the beam in our brother’s eye, if you read the rest of the passage, if we get the beam out of our own eyes first . It seems that the point is not to be a hypocrite, and that the point is not ever, ever determining something negative about somebody.
We judge lest we not be judged should be We don’t judge, lest we be judged
Sorry for that, and a few other English mistakes.
“If you check the ‘Sound Bite’ page, you’ll notice that the first quote is in dispute as to whether he ever said it. It comes from Dale Carnegie’s ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People.'”
Scott, Carnegie attributes the quote to Johnson in that book. That’s where I got it. I have no idea where Carnegie got it.
As for the interpretation of the quote, J.R. and Karen, I took it not as a literal theological definition but as a warning from Johnson that, in imitation of our Lord, we should not be hasty to judge.