I have already pointed out the two emphatic thoughts that lie in that
clause, 'God weigheth,' and 'weigheth the spirits.' I need not repeat
what I said, in the introduction to these remarks, upon this subject.
Just let us take with us these two thoughts, that the same actions
which we sometimes test, in our very defective and loaded balances,
have also to go into the infallible scales, and that the actions go
with their interpretation in their motive. 'God weighs the spirits.'
He reads what we do by His knowledge of what we are. We reveal to one
another what we are by what we do, and, as is a commonplace, none of
us can penetrate, except very superficially and often inaccurately, to
the motives that actuate. But the motive is three-fourths of the
action. God does not go from without, as it were, inwards; from our
actions to estimate our characters; but He starts with the character
and the motive--the habitual character and the occasional motive--and
by these He reads the deed. He weighs, ponders, penetrates to the
heart of the thing, and He weighs the spirits.
So on the one hand, 'I obtained mercy, because I did it ignorantly in
unbelief,' and many a deed which the world would condemn, and in which
we onlookers would see evil, God does not wholly condemn, because He,
being the Inlooker as well as the Onlooker, sees the albeit mistaken
yet pure motives that underlay it. So it is conceivable that the
inquisitor, and the heretic that he sent to the stake, may stand side
by side in God's estimate; the one if he were actuated by pure zeal
for the truth, the other because he was actuated by self-sacrifice in
loyalty to his Lord. And, on the other hand, many a deed that goes
flaunting through the world in 'purple and fine linen' will be
stripped of its gauds, and stand naked and ugly before the eyes of
'Him with whom we have to do.' He 'weighs the spirits.'