The Complete Works of Kahlil Gibran: All poems and short stories (Global Classics)

by Kahlil Gibran

On a day as we rested with Him in the Garden of Pomegranates, I said to Him, “Master, you forgive and console the sinner and all the weak and the infirm save only the hypocrite alone.” And He said, “You have chosen your words well when you called the sinners weak and infirm. I do forgive them their weakness of body and their infirmity of spirit. For their failings have been laid upon them by their forefathers, or by the greed of their neighbours. “But I tolerate not the hypocrite, because he himself lays a yoke upon the guileless and the yielding. “Weaklings, whom you call sinners, are like the featherless young that fall from the nest. The hypocrite is the vulture waiting upon a rock for the death of the prey. “Weaklings are men lost in a desert. But the hypocrite is not lost. He knows the way yet he laughs between the sand and the wind. “For this cause I do not receive him.”