Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you
The dangers of praise
“ Woe unto you, when all men shall speak well of you.
”
1. First of all, it is more than probable that, if they do so, their judgment of you is fallacious; you do not deserve it. “In the like manner did their fathers unto the false prophets.” Men are fallible judges of one another’s real character.
2. And yet, secondly, you must remark that, however fallacious, however false, the popular estimate, it has a direct tendency to carry us along with it. One would have imagined that no man could be misled, in his own judgment of himself, by anything that another, or that all the world, could say of him.
3. And then follow, in the third place, certain practical consequences; all of them, in a Christian point of view, serious and even disastrous. The first of these is, the loss of humility.
4. With the decay of humility comes the loss of watchfulness.
5. And with the loss of humility and the loss of watchfulness comes as a natural consequence the loss of strength. Praise is an essentially enfeebling and enervating thing. It relaxes the sinews of the mind as sultry weather those of the body.
6. Again, it is an effect of being well spoken of, to make a man covet that approbation and at last live for it. The praise of men has a direct tendency to attach us to earth, and to make us forget heaven. “They loved the praise of men more than the praise of God.” And this leads us, in the last place, to suggest one or two cautions with which our Lord’s words in the text ought to be guarded, lest they should too much discourage one class of hearers. There are those whose characters possess a beauty and a charm which make it absolutely impossible that they should not be loved. And if there be amongst us to-day some of whom all men do not speak well; some who, whether through fault or no fault of theirs, are neither generally popular nor in danger of suffering from this kind of temptation; do not (he words of the text, so wise in their counsel, and (like all our Lord’s words) so wide in their application, suggest to them a sure ground of comfort under what at times they feel to be a heavy trial? (Dean Vaughan.)
The woe of a favourable reputation
In the life of Alexander Raleigh, D.D., we are told that at one period of his life, accusations were laid before the public in pamphlets which were well adapted to cause him pain and annoyance. The experience was new to him, who all his life had made no enemies. “You have at last,” said one of his people to him, meeting him on the street, “escaped one of the woes of Scripture;” Woe unto you when all men shall speak well of you! It is reported of Titus Vespasian, that when any spake ill of him, he was wont to say that he was above false reports; and if they were true, he had more reason to be angry with himself than the relator. And the good Emperor Theodosius commanded no man should be punished that spake against him; “for what was spoken slightly,” said he, “was to be laughed at; what spitefully, to be pardoned; what angrily, to be pitied; and if truly, he would thank them for it.”