Publicans and sinners.
Appreciation an elevating influence
You cannot elevate, you cannot improve any man whom you utterly despise. You cannot bring the best out of a man if you do not believe that the best is somewhere in him. There is a shocking insolence in human judgments, and the tendency of them is to crush men down to their own base level, till the whole world is all thistles and all mole-hills, never a mountain and never a forest tree. When Cowper was a Westminster boy, he was despised as a shrinking, moping, ineffectual creature; it was not until the age of fifty, that in the warmth of loving appreciation, like flowers in the sun, the powers unfolded within him, which made him one of the sweetest of English poets. When Clyde became the hero of Plassy and the conqueror of India, his father said that he did not think the booby had so much sense. When Dal-garno, the ablest and most eloquent man of his day, went to an English countess as a candidate for the post of tutor to her sons, she insulted him with the remark that she could not possibly engage a person so stupid. So it is, we judge men not by what they are, not by what they might be, but by our own dull prejudices and ignorant misconceptions.
Men are elevated by an appeal to their best qualities
My brethren, the love that sees goodness and beauty in all human nature helps to make goodness, and to make beauty in human nature. The moon turns but one side to the earth; it has another side in which there may be silver lights and shades undreamed of, seen only by the angels of God. So there are two sides to your character and mine. The woman whom you despise when you meet her as so dull and commonplace is an angel of God to her husband, and the man whom you think so singularly stupid and ineffectual is a very idol to his mother and his sisters. What makes the difference? The man is the same. It is love makes the difference, it is appreciation, it is sympathy. To those in whom the man is not one of a class, he is not a publican or a sinner, or a heretic, or a Samaritan, but he is a human soul, who walks in the transfiguring glory of their affection. You think a person dull-why, that is because you are dull. An angel has been with you and you have known it not, and I imagine that to a spirit full of malice and self-conceit an angel would be very dull. Each human soul is like a cavern full of gems. The casual observer glances into it through some cranny, and all looks dark and sullen and forgotten. But let light enter into it; lift a torch up to the walls, let God’s sunlight fall into it and flood its open recesses, and lo! it will flash with crystals and with amethysts, and each separate crystal will quiver under the touch of brightness with a transporting discovery of its own nature. If souls do not shine before you it is because you bring them no light to make them shine. Throw away your miserable, smouldering, fuming torch of conceit and hatred, lift up to them the light of love, and lo! they will arise and shine; yea, flame and burn with an undreamt of glory. (Canon Farrar.)