Do not imagine Judas the only man of whom the Lord would say, “Better were it for that man if he had never been born!” Did the Lord speak out of personal indignation, or did he utter a spiritual fact? Did he speak in anger at the treachery of his apostle, or in pity for the man that had better not have been born? Did the word spring from his knowledge of some fearful punishment awaiting Judas, or from his sense of the horror it was to be such a man? 

What a waking, into the full blaze of fact and consciousness, of truth and violation! Or think what it must be for a man counting himself religious, orthodox, exemplary, to perceive suddenly that there was no religion in him, only love of self; no love of the right, only a great love of being in the right! What a discovery—that he was simply a hypocrite—one who loved to appear, and was not!  

...so long as we do not try to hide things, so long as we are ready to bow our heads in hearty shame where it is fit we should be ashamed. For to be ashamed is a holy and blessed thing...to be humbly ashamed is to be plunged in the cleansing bath of the truth.

Will you welcome any discovery, even if it work for the excuse of others, that will make you more true, by revealing what in you was false? 

How many hear and accept the words, “Be not conformed to this world,” without once perceiving that what they call Society and bow to as supreme, is the World and nothing else, or that those who mind what people think, and what people will say, are conformed to the world...

The Lord bore with their evil tongues, and was neither dismayed nor troubled; but from this experience of his own, comforts those who, being his messengers, must fare as he.....

The man who does not live in his own consciousness as in the open heavens, is a hypocrite—and for most of us the question is, are we growing less or more of such hypocrites? 

That God could not do the thing at once which he takes time to do, we may surely say without irreverence. His will cannot finally be thwarted; where it is thwarted for a time, the very thwarting subserves the working out of a higher part of his will...

However indignant we may be, however intensely and justly we may feel our wrongs, there is no revenge possible for us in the universe of the Father. 

 ...the moment that the sole adequate punishment, a vision of himself, begins to take true effect upon the sinner, that moment the sinner has begun to grow a righteous man, and the brother human whom he has offended has nothing left him but to take the offender to his bosom—the more tenderly that his brother is repentant, that he was dead and is alive again, that he was lost and is found. 

What if the only thing to wake the treacherous, money-loving thief,  Judas, to a knowledge of himself, was to let the thing go on to the end, and his kiss betray the Master? Judas did not hate the Master when he kissed him, but not being a true man, his very love betrayed him.