to make a man’s yea less than yea, his nay other than nay.  He said that many people who told lies every day, would be shocked when they discovered that they were liars; and that their lying must be discovered, for the Lord said so.  Every untruthfulness was a passing hypocrisy, and if they would not come to be hypocrites out and out, they must begin to avoid it by speaking every man the truth to his neighbor.  If they did not begin at once to speak the truth, they must grow worse and worse liars.  The Lord called hypocrisy leaven, because of its irresistible, perhaps as well its unseen, growth and spread; he called it the leaven of the Pharisees, because it was the all-pervading quality of their being, and from them was working moral dissolution in the nation, eating like a canker into it, by infecting with like hypocrisy all who looked up to them.

“Is it not a strange drift, this of men,” said the curate, “to hide what is, under the veil of what is not? to seek refuge in lies, as if that which is not, could be an armor of adamant? to run from the daylight for safety, deeper into the cave?  In the cave house the creatures of the night—­the tigers and hyenas, the serpent and the old dragon of the dark; in the light are true men and women, and the clear-eyed angels.  But the reason is only too plain; it is, alas! that they are themselves of the darkness and not of the light.  They do not fear their own.  They are more comfortable with the beasts of darkness than with the angels of light.  They dread the peering of holy eyes into their hearts; they feel themselves naked and fear to be ashamed, therefore cast the garment of hypocrisy about them.  They have that in them so strange to the light that they feel it must be hidden from the eye of day, as a thing hideous, that is, a thing to be hidden.  But the hypocrisy is worse than all it would hide.  That they have to hide again, as a more hideous thing still.

“God hides nothing.  His very work from the beginning is revelation—­a casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after truth.  On and on, from fact to fact divine He advances, until at length in His Son Jesus, He unveils His very face.  Then begins a fresh unveiling, for the very work of the Father is the work the Son Himself has to do—­to reveal.  His life was the unveiling of Himself, and the unveiling of the Son is still going on, and is that for the sake of which the world exists.  When He is unveiled, that is, when we know the Son, we shall know the Father also.  The whole of creation, its growth, its history, the gathering total of human existence, is an unveiling of the Father.  He is the life, the eternal life, the Only.  I see it—­ah! believe me—­I see it as I can not say it.  From month to month it grows upon me.  The lovely home-light, the One essence of peaceful being, is God Himself.