If any of you would bring to judgment the unfaithful wife,
Let him also weigh the heart of her husband in scales, and measure his soul with measurements.
And let him who would lash the offender look unto the spirit of the offended.
And if any of you would punish in the name of righteousness and lay the axe unto the evil tree, let him see to its roots;
And verily he will find the roots of the good and the bad, the fruitful and the fruitless, all entwined together in the silent heart of the earth.
And you judges who would be just.
What judgment pronounce you upon him who though honest in the flesh is yet a thief in spirit?
What penalty lay you upon him who slays in the flesh yet is himself slain in the spirit?
And how prosecute you him who in action is a deceiver and an oppressor,
Yet who also is aggrieved and outraged?
And how shall you punish those whose remorse is already greater than their misdeeds?
Is not remorse the justice which is administered by that very law which you would fain serve?
Yet you cannot lay remorse upon the innocent nor lift it from the heart of the guilty.
Unbidden shall it call in the night, that men may wake and gaze upon themselves.
And you who would understand justice, how shall you unless you look upon all deeds in the fullness of light?
Only then shall you know that the erect and the fallen are but one man standing in twilight between the night of his pigmy-self and the day of his god-self.
And that the corner-stone of the temple is not higher than the lowest stone in its foundation.

Kahlil Gibran says beautiful things, and once in a while he comes very close to truth. But most of the time he misses the target. He is a good poet but not a great archer.

He is just like a physician, who may help you but who knows only the symptoms of your disease and cures the symptoms. But the symptoms are not the causes. If you cure the symptoms the disease will erupt somewhere else. His thinking is more concerned about actions but not about the source of actions. And no man has ever known any transformation unless he has come face to face with the causes.

He is saying:

If any of you would bring to judgment the unfaithful wife,
Let him also weigh the heart of her husband in scales, and measure his soul with measurements.

It is good, there is some compassion in it, but no real insight into the very source of the problem. The problem is, who are you to demand faith from anybody else? It may be your wife or your husband – demanding faith is demanding slavery. Behind a beautiful word faith you are hiding an ugly disease, the very cancer of soul that has killed people’s joy.

What right have you got to demand faith from your wife or from your husband? The real problem is not touched. The real problem is marriage. Marriage has given a wrong conception to people, that love is something permanent. Only stones are permanent, only dead people are permanent. Only idiots never change. The more intelligent you are, the more your life is going to be a life of continuous change.

Don’t condemn the wife or the husband for faithlessness. In the first place, to ask for faith is wrong. There was a season – the spring, the faith, the love arose in you. You were not the makers of it. You are not the doers of it, it is a happening. Just like a breeze it comes and just like a breeze it goes.

When it comes, rejoice. And when it goes, say good-bye. Show your gratefulness for all those beautiful days while the breeze was dancing around you and made you dance, while the breeze was passing through you and made you sing. Yes, it is sad, but it is not sin.

Kahlil Gibran is still repeating the old, rotten idea of faithfulness. But faithfulness simply means slavery, and slavery against yourself. Millions of couples in the world know that now there is no longer love, but still – for respectability, for reputation, for society and for other causes – they go on pretending that they love each other. This pretension is the real sin, the real crime.