"For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven" (Matt. 5:20).
The truth is, says Christ, that what is wrong is that you are all using far too low a standard, with the result that you are much too quickly satisfied. It is not nearly enough to be just; though even that, God knows, is hard to practice; or to claim no more than your bare dues; or to pay your fellows their full rights; or to deal with men as they deserve. All that is far less than your bounden duty. When you use such things as your scale of measurement you are taking custom, or the conventions, or other people round about, or at the best the worthiest of them, as your index of how you ought to live and what you ought to be. And none of these will do. For your standard is God. For you to live deliberately on a lower moral plane than God is failure. And look yonder! There is an open sinner; yet you see the sunshine does not skip his fields! And there a scandalously immoral man; yet on his croft the rains fall just as healingly as upon any other. And you too in God's generous way must blot out enmity however well deserved as men judge things, and must forget ingratitude, and must meet rank unworthiness and worse with a queer stubborn love that keeps on obstinately loving in despite of everything. So only shall you prove yourselves the children of that Father who, whatever you have done, still unaccountably persists in loving you.
