And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but perceivest not the beam that is in thine own eye? The thought-leaders of the day were in good truth hypocrites, proud, avaricious, in many cases self-indulgent, bigoted, and selfish; they were utterly unfit to be the moral teachers of the people?봞 position they had arrogated to themselves. The homely but well-known Jewish proverb of the mote and the beam picturesquely put before his listeners the position as it appeared to the Lord. The very defects among the people which the religious teachers professed to lecture upon and to discuss, disfigured and marred their own lives. They were?봳hese priests and scribes and Pharisees?봶orse than self deceivers; they were religious hypocrites. The now famous illustration of the mote and the beam is, as has been said, purely Jewish, and was no doubt a familiar one to the people. It is found in the Talmud (treatise 'Bava Bathra' fol. 15. 2). Farrar quotes from Chaucer??
"He can wel in myn eye see a stalke,
But in his owne he can nought see a balke."
The word "mote" translates the Greek 觀慣???恝?, a chip. In Dutch mot is the dust of wood. In Spanish recta is the flue on cloth.
For a good tree bringeth not forth corrupt fruit; neither doth a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. For every tree is known by his own fruit. For a religious teacher ever to work any real work of good, the first requirement is that he should be known as a faithful doer of the thing he advocates. He must be intensely in earnest, and to be in earnest he must be real. This is emphatically what the religious scribes of Israel were not. This portion of the report of the great sermon, at one period of the Church's history possessed a special importance. It was used as one of the foundations of the system of dualism taught in the once widespread Manichaean heresy, which apparently reached its culminating period of popularity in the fifth century. This heretical school taught that there were two original principles?봮ne good, from which good proceeded; one evil, from which evil came; that there were two races of men, having severally their descent from the one and from the other. The Manichaean teachers, while rejecting many of the Christian doctrines, made much of the sermon on the mount, calling it the "Divine discourse," mainly on account of the statement we are here discussing. Yet here, when the words of Jesus are carefully considered, there is no assertion of Manichaean dualism, neither does the Master hint that there is anything irrevocably fixed in men's natures, so that some can never become good, and others never evil, but only that, so long as a man is as an evil tree, he cannot bring forth good fruit; that if he would do good he must first be good. For of thorns men do not gather figs, nor of a bramble bush gather they grapes. This imagery is taken from what is a common sight in Palestine; behind rough hedges of thorn and of the prickly pear, fig-trees are often seen completely covered with the twining tendrils of vine branches.