Matthew xvi. 3. Oh ye hypocrites, ye can discern the face of the
sky; but can ye not discern the signs of the times?
It will need, I think, some careful thought thoroughly to understand
this text. Our Lord in it calls the Pharisees and Sadducees
hypocrites; because, though they could use their common sense and
experience to judge of the weather they would not use them to judge
of the signs of the times; of what was going to happen to the Jewish
nation.
But how was their conduct hypocritical? Stupid we might call it, or
unreasonable: but how hypocritical? That, I think, we may see
better, by considering what the word hypocrite means.
We mean now, generally, by a hypocrite, a man who pretends to be one
thing, while he is another; who pretends to be pious and good, while
he is leading a profligate life in secret; who pretends to believe
certain doctrines, while at heart he disbelieves them; a man, in
short, who is a scoundrel, _and knows it_; but who does not intend
others to know it: who deceives others, but does not deceive
himself.
My friends, such a man is a hypocrite: but there is another kind of
hypocrite, and a more common one by far; and that is, the hypocrite
who not only deceives others, but deceives himself likewise; the
hypocrite who (as one of the wisest living men puts it) is
astonished that you should think him hypocritical.
I do not say which of these two kinds is the worse. My duty is to
judge no man. I only say that there are such people, and too many
of them; that we ourselves are often in danger of becoming such
hypocrites; and that this was the sort of people which the Pharisees
for the most part were. Hypocrites who had not only deceived
others, but themselves also; who thought themselves perfectly right,
honest, and pious; who were therefore astonished and indignant at
Christ's calling them hypocrites.
How did they get into this strange state of mind? How may we get
into it?
Consider first what a hypocrite means. It means strictly neither
more nor less than a play-actor; one who personates different
characters on the stage. That is the one original meaning of the
word hypocrite.
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 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.
Another reason I have for not dwelling too much on these
affectations; and it is this. Because a man may be a play-actor and
a self-deceiver in religion, without any of these tricks at all, and
without much of the vanity and pride which cause them. For
recollect that a man may act for his own amusement, as well as for
other people's. Children do so perpetually, and especially when no
one is by to listen to them. They delight in playing at being this
person and that, and in living for a while in a day-dream. Oh let
us take care that we do not do the same in our religion! It is but
too easy to do so. Too easy; and too common. For is it not play-
acting, like any child, to come to this church, and here to feel
repentance, feel forgiveness, feel gratitude, feel reverence; and
then to go out of church and awake as from a dream, and become our
natural selves for the rest of the week, till Sunday comes round
again; comforting ourselves meanwhile with the fancy that we had
been very religious last Sunday, and intended to be very religious
next Sunday likewise?
Would there not be hypocrisy and play-acting in that, my friends?
Now, my dear friends, if we give way to this sort of hypocrisy, we
shall get, as too many do, into the habit of living two lives at
once, without knowing it. Outside us will be our religious life of
praying, and reading, and talking of good things, and doing good
work (as, thank God, many do whose hearts are not altogether right
with God, or their eyes single in his sight) good work, which I
trust God will not forget in the last day, in spite of all our
inconsistencies. Outside us, I say, will be our religious life:
and inside us our own actual life, our own natural character, too
often very little changed or improved at all. So by continually
playing at religion, we shall deceive ourselves. We shall make an
entirely wrong estimate of the state of our souls. We shall fancy
that this outward religion of ours is the state of our soul. And
then, if any one tells us that we are play-acting, and hypocrites,
we shall be as astonished and indignant as the Pharisees were of
old. We shall make the same mistake as a man would, who because he
always wore clothes, should fancy at last that his clothes were
himself, part of his own body. So, I say, many deceive themselves,
and are more or less hypocrites to themselves. They do not, in
general, deceive others; they are not, on the whole, hypocrites to
their neighbours. For their neighbours, after a time, see what they
cannot see themselves, that they are play-acting; that they are two
different people without knowing it: that their religion is a thing
apart from their real character. A hundred signs shew that. How
many there are, for instance, who are, or seem tolerably earnest
about religion, and doing good, as long as they are actually in
church, or actually talking about religion. But all the rest of
their time, what are they doing? What are they thinking of? Mere
frivolity and empty amusement. Idle butterflies, pretending to be
industrious bees once in the week.
Others again, will be gentle and generous enough about everything
but religion; and as soon as they get upon that, will become fierce,
and hard, and narrow at once. Others again (and this is most
common) commit the very same fault as the Pharisees in the text, who
could use their common sense to discern the signs of the weather,
and yet could not use it to discern the signs of the time, because
they were afraid of looking honestly at the true state of public
feeling and conscience, and at the danger and ruin into which their
religion and their party were sinking. For about all worldly
matters, these men will be as sound-headed and reasonable as they
need be: but as soon as they get on religious matters, they become
utterly silly and unreasonable; and will talk nonsense, listen to
nonsense, and be satisfied with nonsense, such as they would not
endure a moment if their own worldly interest, or worldly character,
were in question.
But most of all do these poor souls not deceive their neighbours
when a time of temptation comes upon them. For then, alas! it comes
out too often that they are of those whom our Lord spoke of, who
heard the word gladly, but had no root in themselves, and in time of
temptation fell away. For then, before the storm of some trying
temptation, away goes all the play-acting religion; and the man's
true self rises up from underneath into ugly life. Up rise,
perhaps, pride, and self-will, and passion; up rise, perhaps,
meanness and love of money; up rise, perhaps, cowardice and
falsehood; or up rises foul and gross sin, causing some horrible
scandal to religion, and to the name of Christ; while fools look on,
and, laughing an evil laugh, cry,--'These are your high professors.
These are your Pharisees, who were so much better than everybody
else. When they are really tried, it seems they behave no better
than we sinners.'
Oh, these are the things which make a clergyman's heart truly sad.
These are the things which make him long that all were over; that
Christ would shortly accomplish the number of his elect, and hasten
his kingdom, that we, with all those who are departed in the true
faith of his holy name, may rest in peace for ever from sin and
sinners.
Not that I mean that some of these very people, in spite of all
their inconsistency, will not be among that number. God forbid!
How do we know that? How do we know that they are one whit worse
than we should be in their place? How do we know, above all, that
to have been found out may not be the very best thing that has
happened to them since the day that they were born? How do we know
that it may not be God's gracious medicine to enable them to find
themselves out; to make them see themselves in their true colours;
to purge them of all their play-acting; and begin all over again,
crying to God, not with the lips only, but out of the depth of an
honest and a noble shame, as David did of old--Behold I was shapen
in wickedness, conceived in sin, and I have found it out at last.
But thou requirest truth in the inward parts, in the very root and
ground of the heart, and not merely truth in the head, in the lips,
and in the outward behaviour. Make me a clean heart, O God, and
renew a right spirit within me. Thou desirest no sacrifice, else
would I give it thee: but thou delightest not in burnt-offerings.
The sacrifice of God is a broken spirit, as mine is now. A broken
and a contrite heart, ground down by the shame of its own sin, that,
O God, thou wilt not despise.
And then--when that prayer has gone up in earnest, and has been
answered by the gift of a clean heart, and of a right spirit, which
desires nothing but to be made clean and made right, to learn its
duty and to do it--then, I say, that man may go back safely and
freely, to such forms and ceremonies, as he has been accustomed to,
and have been consecrated by the piety and wisdom of his
forefathers. For, says David, though forms and ceremonies,
sacrifice and burnt-offering cannot make any peace with God, yet I
am not going to give up forms and ceremonies, sacrifice and burnt-
offerings. No. When my peace is made, when the broken and the
contrite heart has put me in my true place again, and my heart is
clean, and my spirit right once more; then, he says, will God be
pleased with my sacrifices, with my burnt-offerings and oblations;
because they will be the sacrifice of righteousness, of a righteous
man desiring to shew honour to that God from whom his righteousness
comes, and gratitude to that God to whom he owes his pardon.
And so with us, my friends, if ever we have fallen, and been
pardoned, and risen again to a new, a truer, a more honest, a more
righteous life. Our forms of devotion ought then to become not a
snare and a hypocrisy, but honest outward signs of the spiritual
grace which is within us; as honest and as rational as the shake of
the hand to the friend whom we truly love, as the bowing of the knee
before the Queen for whom we would gladly die.
O may God give us all grace to seek first the kingdom of God and his
righteousness. To seek first the kingdom of God; to work earnestly,
each in his place, to do God's will, and to teach and help others to
do it likewise. To seek his righteousness, which is the
righteousness of the heart and spirit: and then all other things
will be added to us. All outward forms and ceremonies, ways of
speaking, ways of behaving, which are good and right for us, will
come to us as a matter of course; growing up in us naturally and
honestly, without any affectation or hypocrisy, and the purity and
soberness, the reverence and earnestness of our outward
conversation, will be a pattern of the purity and soberness, the
reverence and earnestness, which dwells in our hearts by the
inspiration of the Holy Spirit of God.