It appears throughout the Sermon on the Mount that there was a class of persons whom Christ regarded with peculiar aversion—­the persons who call themselves one thing and are another.  He describes them by a word which originally meant an “actor.”  Probably it may in Christ’s time have already become current in the sense which we give to the word “hypocrite.”  But no doubt whenever it was used the original sense of the word was distinctly remembered.  And in this Sermon, whenever Christ denounces any vice, it is with the words “Be not you like the actors.”  In common with all great reformers, Christ felt that honesty in word and deed was the fundamental virtue; dishonesty, including affectation, self-consciousness, love of stage effect, the one incurable vice.  Our thoughts, words, and deeds are to be of a piece.  For example, if we would pray to God, let us go into some inner room where none but God shall see us; to pray at the corner of the streets, where the passing crowd may admire our devotion, is to act a prayer.  If we would keep down the rebellious flesh by fasting, this concerns ourselves only; it is acting to parade before the world our self-mortification.  And if we would put down sin let us put it down in ourselves first; it is only the actor who begins by frowning at it in others.  But there are subtler forms of hypocrisy, which Christ does not denounce, probably because they have sprung since out of the corruption of a subtler creed.  The hypocrite of that age wanted simply money or credit with the people.  His ends were those of the vulgar, though his means were different Christ endeavoured to cure both alike of their vulgarity by telling them of other riches and another happiness laid up in heaven.  Some, of course, would neither understand nor regard his words, others would understand and receive them.  But a third class would receive them without understanding them, and instead of being cured of their avarice and sensuality, would simply transfer them to new objects of desire.  Shrewd enough to discern Christ’s greatness, instinctively believing what he said to be true, they would set out with a triumphant eagerness in pursuit of the heavenly riches, and laugh at the short-sighted and weak-minded speculator who contented himself with the easy but insignificant profits of a worldly life.  They would practise assiduously the rules by which Christ said heaven was to be won.  They would patiently turn the left cheek, indefatigibly walk the two miles, they would bless with effusion those who cursed them, and pray fluently for those who used them spitefully.  To love their enemies, to love any one, they would certainly find impossible, but the outward signs of love might easily be learnt.  And thus there would arise a new class of actors, not like those whom Christ denounced, exhibiting before an earthly audience and receiving their pay from human managers, but hoping to be paid for their performance out of the incorruptible treasures, and to impose