Better Judged by God, than by Men
February 1, 2023
BE glad that it will be a divine tribunal, not a human tribunal, that you will stand before when all has fallen away.
As Fr. Frederick Faber wrote in The Creator And The Creature; Or The Wonders Of Divine Love (Richardson and Son, 1857), p. 388:
No one can look forward without very solemn apprehensions to his final judgment. Yet it is the deliberate conviction of our best thoughts and most mature reflection, that we had rather leave our final doom in the hands of the all-holy God than in those of the most merciful of sinful men. Our knowledge of God does not leave us room for a moment’s hesitation. Strange to say! intimately as we know our own wretchedness, and appalled as we often are by the vision of our own sins, our sense of security in the hands of God rises in great measure from the fact that He knows us better than any one else can know us. There are so many things by which God will not judge us, and by which men would judge us, that it seems as if our deliverance from these was already half a verdict in our favour. How often in life are we accused wrongly and mistakenly! How are motives imputed to us which we never had! …. When we do wrong, we often struggle manfully before we give way, but men put not these invisible struggles to our account. . . Full of want of simplicity as we are, and far from perfect truth, we are on the whole always more sincere than we seem. We often have good motives for imprudent and ill -looking actions. When we often appear careless and unkind, some secret sorrow is oppressing us, or anxiety disturbing us, or responsibility harassing us. Now God sees all this rightly, and man cannot. God does not judge us by any of these things; man must. Hence it is, a strange conclusion for sinners to come to that God loves us better than men do, because He knows us better.
He judges us by our inward religious acts, which necessarily go for nothing with men. He judges us by the fructifying of His own gifts within us, a very slight portion of which ever becomes visible to men, and even that portion only partially visible. Moreover He judges us as He sees us in His Son. He judges us by the love which Mary, angels, and saints have for us. And finally He judges us with all our good ever collectively before Him, while our evil is interrupted by frequent absolutions, and our sins supernaturally effaced by the Precious Blood, so that by the laws of His own redeeming love He cannot see them in the same way that men see them. Thus we are most reasonable in preferring rather to be judged by God than by men. The acutenesses of their criticism are far more to be dreaded than the niceties of His justice, when omnipotent love sits by as its assessor. Now if we judge that the great majority of Catholics will not be saved, it is a human judgment; and like all human judgments, it is more rigorous than the divine, because of the ignorance and the temper of the judge. Therefore we may modestly hope that God’s judgment is otherwise, and that the great majority of Catholics are saved. It is only applying to the case of the multitude what we each of us find true in our own, that largeness and allowance in the Creator’s judgment, which it is hopeless to look for at the tribunal of the creature.
