I have showed you many fair virtues:  I speak not for them; if their sight cannot command affection let them lose it.  They shall please yet better after you have troubled your eyes a little with the view of deformities; and by how much more they please, so much more odious and like themselves shall these deformities appear.  This light contraries give to each other in the midst of their enmity, that one makes the other seem more good or ill.  Perhaps in some of these (which thing I do at once fear and hate) my style shall seem to some less grave, more satirical:  if you find me, not without cause, jealous, let it please you to impute it to the nature of those vices which will not be otherwise handled.  The fashions of some evils are, besides the odiousness, ridiculous, which to repeat is to seem bitterly merry.  I abhor to make sport with wickedness, and forbid any laughter here but of disdain.  Hypocrisy shall lead this ring worthily, I think, because both she cometh nearest to virtue and is the worst of vices.

CHARACTER OF THE HYPOCRITE.

An hypocrite is the worst kind of player, by so much as he acts the better part, which hath always two faces, ofttimes two hearts; that can compose his forehead to sadness and gravity, while he bids his heart be wanton and careless within, and in the meantime laughs within himself to think how smoothly he hath cozened the beholder.  In whose silent face are written the characters of religion, which his tongue and gestures pronounce but his hands recant.  That hath a clean face and garment with a foul soul, whose mouth belies his heart, and his fingers belie his mouth.  Walking early up into the city, he turns into the great church, and salutes one of the pillars on one knee, worshipping that God which at home he cares not for, while his eye is fixed on some window, on some passenger, and his heart knows not whither his lips go.  He rises, and looking about with admiration, complains on our frozen charity, commends the ancient.  At church he will ever sit where he may be seen best, and in the midst of the sermon pulls out his tables in haste, as if he feared to lose that note; when he writes either his forgotten errand or nothing.  Then he turns his Bible with a noise to seek an omitted quotation, and folds the leaf as if he had found it, and asks aloud the name of the preacher, and repeats it, whom he publicly salutes, thanks, praises, invites, entertains with tedious good counsel, with good discourse, if it had come from an honester mouth.  He can command tears when he speaks of his youth, indeed because it is past, not because it was sinful; himself is now better, but the times are worse.  All other sins he reckons up with detestation, while he loves and hides his darling in his bosom.  All his speech returns to himself, and every occurrence draws in a story to his own praise.  When he should give, he looks about him and says, “Who sees me?”