Article July 22, 1916 Issue

The Even Balance

JUDGE SEPTIMUS J. HANNA

In the book of Job we read, "Let me be weighed in an even balance, that God may know mine integrity," and in Proverbs it is written, "A false balance is abomination to the Lord: but a just weight is his delight." In the sixth chapter of Revelation we are told of one who holding "a pair of balances in his hand," said: "A measure of wheat for a penny, and three measures of barley for a penny;" and who also gave to men the warning, "See thou hurt not the oil and the wine."

This Scripture has no doubt both a literal and a figurative meaning. The literal relates to the material, the figurative to the spiritual. The even balance figuratively implies that spiritual equipoise which keeps the individual as it were in the middle of the scales of understanding and demonstration, so that he turns the weight neither too far beyond his present understanding of the divine nor too far on the side of the human; or so that he is not too short either in his measure of the absolute or in his measure of the relative.

If prematurely one should lose his balance on the side of the divine, he may become overwrought and self-deceived, or perhaps self-righteous, and so incapable of judging either himself or others righteously. If he should lose his balance on the side of the relative, or human, he may so far lose sight of the divine as to be equally unfit to judge himself or others rightly. Either condition may unfit the individual for the true spiritual vision. Had not Jacob's perception been well balanced, he could not have seen in his dream both the bottom and the top of the ladder which led to heaven, nor "the angels of God ascending and descending" thereon. An uneven balance might have so warped his power of vision that he believed he saw the top of the ladder and overlooked the intervening rungs; or else he might have seen only the lower rungs and stood aghast at the necessity for climbing to the top. His vision was manifestly clear enough so that he took in the full scope of the demonstration necessary to spiritual wholeness.

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