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.  He trusted in himself that he was righteous.  True.  But whatever that means, it means that he thought that he was righteous, after a fashion, though it proved to be a wrong one.  What our Lord complains of in them is, first, their hardness of heart; their pride in themselves, and their contempt for their fellowmen.  Their very name Pharisee meant that.  It meant separate—­they were separate from mankind; a peculiar people; who alone knew the law, with whom alone God was pleased:  while the rest of mankind, even of their own countrymen, knew not the law, and were accursed, and doomed to hell.  Ah God, who are we to cast stones at the Pharisees of old, when this is the very thing which you may hear said in England from hundreds of pulpits every Sunday, with the mere difference, that instead of the word law, men put the word gospel.

For this our Lord denounced them; and next, for their hypocrisy, their play-acting, the outward show of religion in which they delighted; trying to dress, and look, and behave differently from other men; doing all their good works to be seen of men; sounding a trumpet before them when they gave away alms; praying standing at the corners of the streets; going in long clothing, making broad their phylacteries, the written texts of Scripture which they sewed to their garments; washing perpetually when they came from the market, or any public place, lest they should have been defiled by the touch of an unclean thing, or person; loving the chief seats in their religious meetings, and the highest places at feasts; and so forth,—­full of affectation, vanity, and pride.

I could tell you other stories of their ridiculous affectations:  but I shall not.  They would only make you smile:  and we could not judge them fairly, not being able to make full allowance for the difference of customs between the Jews and ourselves.  Many of the things which our Lord blames them for, were not nearly so absurd in Judea of old, as they seem to us in England now.  Indeed, no one but our Lord seems to have thought them absurd, or seen through the hollowness and emptiness of them:—­as he perhaps sees through, my friends, a great deal which is thought very right in England now.  Making allowance for the difference of the country, and of the times, the Pharisees were perhaps no more affected, for Jews, than many people are now, for Englishmen.  And if it be answered, that though our religious fashions now-a-days are not commanded expressly by the Bible or the Prayer Book, yet they carry out their spirit:—­ remember, in God’s name, that that was exactly what the Pharisees said, and their excuse for being righteous above what was written; and that they could, and did, quote texts of Scripture for their phylacteries, their washings, and all their other affectations.