of unreality.  And thus the transition is easily made from a comparatively innocent and unconscious formalist to a conscious and studied hypocrite.  ‘An hypocrite,’ says Samuel Rutherford, ’is he who on the stage represents a king when he is none, a beggar, an old man, a husband, when he is really no such thing.  To the Hebrews, they were faciales, face-men; colorati, dyed men, red men, birds of many colours.  You may paint a man, you may paint a rose, you may paint a fire burning, but you cannot paint a soul, or the smell of a rose, or the heat of a fire.  And it is hard to counterfeit spiritual graces, such as love to Christ, sincere intending of the glory of God, and such like spiritual things.’  Yes, indeed; it is hard to put on and to go through with a truly spiritual grace even to the best and most spiritually-minded of men; and as for the true hypocrite, he never honestly attempts it.  If he ever did honestly and resolutely attempt it, he would at once in that pass out of the ranks of the hypocrites altogether and pass over into a very different category.  Bunyan lets us see how a formalist and a hypocrite and a Christian all respectively do when they come to a real difficulty.  The three pilgrims were all walking in the same path, and with their faces for the time in the same direction.  They had not held much conference together since their first conversation, and as time goes on, Christian has no more talk but with himself, and that sometimes sighingly, and sometimes more comfortably.  When, all at once, the three men come on the hill Difficulty.  A severe act of self-denial has to be done at this point of their pilgrimage.  A proud heart has to be humbled to the dust.  A second, a third, a tenth place has to be taken in the praise of men.  An outbreak of anger and wrath has to be kept under for hours and days.  A great injury, a scandalous case of ingratitude, has to be forgiven and forgotten; in short, as Rutherford says, an impossible-to-be-counterfeited spiritual grace has to be put into its severest and sorest exercise; and the result was—­what we know.  Our pilgrim went and drank of the spring that always runs at the bottom of the hill Difficulty, and thus refreshed himself against that hill; while Formalist took the one low road, and Hypocrisy the other, which led him into a wide field full of dark mountains, where he stumbled and fell and rose no more.  When, after his visit to the spring, Christian began to go up the hill, saying: 

   ’This hill, though high, I covet to ascend;
   The difficulty will not me offend;
   For I perceive the way to life lies here;
   Come, pluck up heart; let’s neither faint nor fear;
   Better, though difficult, the right way to go,
   Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.’