The Shaykh continues his explanation of the hadith. ( . . . . . And if you do a bad deed, do a good deed alongside it, the secret with the secret and the public with the public. . . ).

The Shaykh : Therefore, it is obligatory for us to stand at the limits of Allah and not to presume upon Allah by legislating with our opinions, minds, desires, and customs something that the Messenger of Allah (peace and blessings be upon him) did not legislate for us. On the contrary, we are given the space to remember Allah however it suits us, without adopting a specific method or form, and to observe it as it is facilitated, as He said in this hadith:
This hadith is also an explanation of another hadith of Mu'adh, in which the Messenger (peace be upon him) said: . This details that general statement by saying: if you make a mistake, if you disobey your Lord publicly, you must follow that with repentance and a good deed publicly. But if you are afflicted with doing something in secret, do not expose yourself and do not announce your sin; rather, repent to Allah (Mighty and Majestic), which is undoubtedly a good deed, and also do good deeds in secret. That is further from you approaching showing off in performing this deed. As for if you do a bad deed publicly, here the publicizing of repentance from it is ... for the soul, and it is a subjugation and humbling of it. And for this reason, you find that when many people make a mistake publicly, a person comes and advises them that they made a mistake and that they should announce their mistake to the people. Few do that. And from this we know that enjoining good and forbidding evil does not have a specific fixed system, as it appears to some people who are dominated by politics in their calling, in their claim. They think that, for example, if the preacher makes a mistake on the pulpit and narrates a fabricated hadith with no basis, one of the people stands up. And this, unfortunately, does not exist in this country, whereas in Egypt it happens a lot. The reason is that the Egyptian country has, I mean, a more scholarly spirit than this country. We know of many incidents where some of the attendees rebuke the preacher for a hadith or an opinion in which he erred ... and the preachers are between sincere people and insincere people ... and so on. The mistake is that if an error occurs publicly, it must be rebuked publicly, and if it occurs in secret, it must be rebuked in secret. Because in the first case, as it pleases some people, as we said earlier, this preacher is taken aside after his sermon and after his prayer, and it is said to him in a gentle language: "May Allah bless you, your sermon was so sweet and so beneficial, and so on, a severe lecture so that the Muslim can offer a concise piece of advice to his Muslim brother, but a hadith of so-and-so came in his sermon, and this is a fabricated hadith." This is what some propose. This evil can be benefited from by this style in order to preserve the heart of this one being advised, because, unfortunately, the souls of most Muslims have become Pharaonic and arrogant, not accepting advice except from whom Allah wills. This style could have been adopted with two conditions, one of which is absolutely impossible to achieve, and the other may be possible. The first: that he gathers the people he made a mistake to in his sermon, all of them in a second sermon or a second meeting, and says: "I mentioned to you in the previous sermon a hadith of so-and-so, and this hadith has been shown to be fabricated." It is not possible to gather these people.