Now recollect that a man may personate characters, like a play-actor, and pretend to be what he is not, for two different objects.  He may do it for other people’s sake, or for his own.

1.  For other people’s sake.  As the Pharisees did, when they did all their works to be seen of men; and therefore, naturally, gave their attention as much as possible to outward forms and ceremonies, which could be seen by men.

Now, understand me, before I go a step further, I am not going to speak against forms and ceremonies.  No man less:  and, above all, not against the Church forms and ceremonies, which have grown up, gradually and naturally, out of the piety, and experience, and practical common sense of many generations of God’s saints.  Men must have forms and ceremonies to put them in mind of the spiritual truths which they cannot see or handle.  Men cannot get on without them; and those who throw away the Church forms have to invent fresh ones, and less good ones, for themselves.

All, I say, have their forms and ceremonies; and all are in danger, as we churchmen are, of making those forms stand instead of true religion.  In the Church or out of the Church, men are all tempted to have, like the Pharisees, their traditions of the elders, their little rules as to conduct, over and above what the Bible and the Prayer-book have commanded; and all are tempted to be more shocked if those rules are broken, than if really wrong and wicked things are done; and like the Pharisees of old, to be careful in paying tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, the commonest garden herbs, and yet forget the weighty matters of the law, justice, mercy, and judgment.  I have known those who would be really more shocked at seeing a religious man dance or sing, than at hearing him tell a lie.  But I will give no examples, lest I should set you on judging others.  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