And he went out and wept bitterly.- Matthew 26:75b

In his famous autobiography, Henry Adams wrote of his chronic irritability. He thought it was the result of knowing too much about his neighbors and thinking too much of himself. We have in Luke’s parable of the Pharisee and the publican a man who, like the early Henry Adams, combines a low opinion of his neighbors with a high estimate of his own qualities. The Pharisee’s prayer in chapter eighteen is taken from life, for a similar prayer comes to us in the Talmud in the first century A.D.:

I thank thee, O Lord, my God, that thou has given me my lot with those who sit in the seat of learning, and not with those who sit at the street corner; for I am early to work, and they are early to work; I am early to work on the words of the Torah, …