Or rather, the only example which I will give is that of
these Pharisees, who have become, by our Lord's words about them,
famous to all time, as hypocrites.
Now you must bear in mind that these Pharisees were not villains and
profligates. Many people, feeling, perhaps, how much of what the
Lord had said against the Pharisees would apply to them, have tried
to escape from that ugly thought, by making out the Pharisees worse
men than our Lord does. But the fact is, that they cannot be proved
to be worse than too many religious people now-a-days. There were
adulterers, secret loose-livers among them. Are there none now-a-
days? They were covetous. Are no religious professors covetous
now-a-days? They crept into widows' houses, and, for a pretence
made long prayers. Does no one do so now? There would, of course,
be among them, as there is among all large religious parties, as
there is now, a great deal of inconsistent and bad conduct. But, on
the whole, there is no reason to suppose that the greater number of
them were what we should call ill-livers. In that terrible twenty-
third chapter of St. Matthew, in which our Lord denounces the sins
of the Scribes and Pharisees, he nowhere accuses them of profligate
living; and the Pharisee of whom he tells us in his parable, who
went into the Temple to pray, no doubt spoke truth when he boasted
of not being as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers.
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