'A form of godliness.'--Paul.
We all began our religious life by being formalists. And we were not
altogether to blame for that. Our parents were first to blame for that,
and then our teachers, and then our ministers. They made us say our
psalm and our catechism to them, and if we only said our sacred lesson
without stumbling, we were straightway rewarded with their highest
praise. They seldom took the trouble to make us understand the things we
said to them. They were more than content with our correct repetition of
the words. We were never taught either to read or repeat with our eyes
on the object. And we had come to our manhood before we knew how to seek
for the visual image that lies at the root of all our words. And thus
the ill-taught schoolboy became in us the father of the confirmed
formalist. The mischief of this neglect still spreads through the whole
of our life, but it is absolutely disastrous in our religious life. Look
at the religious formalist at family worship with his household gathered
round him all in his own image. He would not on any account let his
family break up any night without the habitual duty. He has a severe
method in his religious duties that nothing is ever allowed to disarrange
or in any way to interfere with. As the hour strikes, the big Bible is
brought out. He opens where he left off last night, he reads the
regulation chapter, he leads the singing in the regulation psalm, and
then, as from a book, he repeats his regulation prayer. But he never
says a word to show that he either sees or feels what he reads, and his
household break up without an idea in their heads or an affection in
their hearts. He comes to church and goes through public worship in the
same wooden way, and he sits through the Lord's Table in the same formal
and ceremonious manner. He has eyes of glass and hands of wood, and a
heart without either blood or motion in it. His mind and his heart were
destroyed in his youth, and all his religion is a religion of rites and
ceremonies without sense or substance. 'Because I knew no better,' says
Bunyan, 'I fell in very eagerly with the religion of the times: to wit,
to go to church twice a day, and that, too, with the foremost. And there
should I sing and say as others did. Withal, I was so overrun with the
spirit of superstition that I adored, and that with great devotion, even
all things, both the high place, priest, clerk, vestment, service, and
what else belonged to the church: counting all things holy that were
therein contained. But all this time I was not sensible of the danger
and evil of sin. I was kept from considering that sin would damn me,
what religion soever I followed, unless I was found in Christ. Nay, I
never thought of Christ, nor whether there was one or no.'
A formalist is not yet a hypocrite exactly, but he is ready now and well
on the way at any moment to become a hypocrite. As soon now as some
temptation shall come to him to make appear another and a better man than
he really is: when in some way it becomes his advantage to seem to other
people to be a spiritual man: when he thinks he sees his way to some
profit or praise by saying things and doing things that are not true and
natural to him,--then he will pass on from being a bare and simple
formalist, and will henceforth become a hypocrite. He has never had any
real possession or experience of spiritual things amid all his formal
observances of religious duties, and he has little or no difficulty,
therefore, in adding another formality or two to his former life 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.'
Now, all this brings us to the last step in the evolution of a perfect
hypocrite out of a simple formalist. The perfect and finished hypocrite
is not your commonplace and vulgar scoundrel of the playwright and the
penny-novelist type; the finest hypocrite is a character their art cannot
touch. 'The worst of hypocrites,' Rutherford goes on to say, 'is he who
whitens himself till he deceives himself. It is strange that a man hath
such power over himself. But a man's heart may deceive his heart, and he
may persuade himself that he is godly and righteous when he knows nothing
about it.' 'Preaching in a certain place,' says Boston, 'after supper
the mistress of the house told me how I had terrified God's people. This
was by my doctrine of self-love, self-righteousness, self-ends, and such
like. She restricted hypocrites to that sort that do all things to be
seen of men, and harped much on this--how can one be a hypocrite who
hates hypocrisy in other people? how can one be a hypocrite and not know
it? All this led me to see the need of such doctrine.' And if only to
show you that this is not the dismal doctrine of antediluvian
Presbyterians only, Canon Mozley says: 'The Pharisee did not know that he
was a Pharisee; if he had known it he would not have been a Pharisee. He
does not know that he is a hypocrite. The vulgar hypocrite knows that he
is a hypocrite because he deceives others, but the true Scripture
hypocrite deceives himself.' And the most subtle teacher of our century,
or of any century, has said: 'What is a hypocrite? We are apt to
understand by a hypocrite one who makes a profession of religion for
secret ends without practising what he professes; who is malevolent,
covetous, or profligate, while he assumes an outward sanctity in his
words and conduct, and who does so deliberately, deceiving others, and
not at all self-deceived. But this is not what our Saviour seems to have
meant by a hypocrite; nor were the Pharisees such. The Pharisees
deceived themselves as well as others. Indeed, it is not in human nature
to deceive others for any long time without in a measure deceiving
ourselves also. When they began, each in his turn, to deceive the
people, they were not at the moment self-deceived. But by degrees they
forgot that outward ceremonies avail nothing without inward purity. They
did not know themselves, and they unawares deceived themselves as well as
the people.' What a terrible light, as of the last day itself, does all
that cast upon the formalisms and the hypocrisies of which our own
religious life is full! And what a terrible light it casts on those
miserable men who are complete and finished in their self-deception! For
the complete and finished hypocrite is not he who thinks that he is
better than all other men; that is hopeless enough; but the paragon of
hypocrisy is he who does not know that he is worse than all other men.
And in his stone-blindness to himself, and consequently to all reality
and inwardness and spirituality in religion, you see him intensely
interested in, and day and night occupied with, the outside things of
religion, till nothing short of a miracle will open his eyes. See him in
the ministry, for instance, sweating at his sermons and in his visiting,
till you would almost think that he is the minister of whom Paul
prophesied, who should spend and be spent for the salvation of men's
souls. But all the time, such is the hypocrisy that haunts the
ministerial calling, he is really and at bottom animated with ambition
for the praise of men only, and for the increase of his congregation. See
him, again, now assailing or now defending a church's secular privileges,
and he knowing no more, all the time, what a church has been set up for
on earth than the man in the moon. What a penalty his defence is and his
support to a church of Christ, and what an incubus his membership must
be! Or, see him, again, making long speeches and many prayers for the
extension of the kingdom of Christ, and all the time spending ten times
more on wine or whisky or tobacco, or on books or pictures or foreign
travel, than he gives to the cause of home or foreign missions. And so
on, all through our hypocritical and self-blinded life. Through such
stages, and to such a finish, does the formalist pass from his
thoughtless and neglected youth to his hardened, blinded, self-seeking
life, spent in the ostensible service of the church of Christ. If the
light that is in such men be darkness, how great is that darkness! We
may all well shudder as we hear our Lord saying to ministers and members
and church defenders and church supporters, like ourselves: 'Now ye say,
We see; therefore your sin remaineth.'
Now, the first step to the cure of all such hypocrisy, and to the
salvation of our souls, is to know that we are hypocrites, and to know
also what that is in which we are most hypocritical. Well, there are two
absolutely infallible tests of a true hypocrite,--tests warranted to
unmask, expose, and condemn the most finished, refined, and even
evangelical hypocrite in this house to-night, or in all the world. By
far and away the best and swiftest is prayer. True prayer, that is. For
here again our inexpugnable hypocrisy comes in and leads us down to
perdition even in our prayers. There is nothing our Lord more bitterly
and more contemptuously assails the Pharisees for than just the length,
the loudness, the number, and the publicity of their prayers. The truth
is, public prayer, for the most part, is no true prayer at all. It is at
best an open homage paid to secret prayer. We make such shipwrecks of
devotion in public prayer, that if we have a shred of true religion about
us, we are glad to get home and to shut our door. We preach in our
public prayers. We make speeches on public men and on public events in
our public prayers. We see the reporters all the time in our public
prayers. We do everything but pray in our public prayers. And to get
away alone,--what an escape that is from the temptations and defeats of
public prayer! No; public prayer is no test whatever of a hypocrite. A
hypocrite revels in public prayer. It is secret prayer that finds him
out. And even secret prayer will sometimes deceive us. We are crushed
down on our secret knees sometimes, by sheer shame and the strength of
conscience. Fear of exposure, fear of death and hell, will sometimes
make us shut our door. A flood of passing feeling will sometimes make us
pray for a season in secret. Job had all that before him when he said,
'Will the hypocrite delight himself in the Almighty? will he always call
upon God?' No, he will not. And it is just here that the hypocrite and
the true Christian best discover themselves both to God and to
themselves. The true Christian will, as Job again says, pray in secret
till God slays him. He will pray in his dreams; he will pray till death;
he will pray after he is dead. Are you in earnest, then, not to be any
more a hypocrite and to know the infallible marks of such? Ask the key
of your closet door. Ask the chair at your bedside. Ask the watchman
what you were doing and why your light was in so long. Ask the birds of
the air and the beasts of the field and the crows on the ploughed lands
after your solitary walk.
Almost a better test of true and false religion than even secret prayer,
but a test that is far more difficult to handle, is our opinion of
ourselves. In His last analysis of the truly justified man and the truly
reprobate, our Lord made the deepest test to be their opinion of
themselves. 'God, I thank Thee that I am not as this publican,' said the
hypocrite. 'God be merciful to me a sinner,' said the true penitent. And
then this fine principle comes in here--not only to speed the sure
sanctification of a true Christian, but also, if he has skill and courage
to use it, for his assurance and comfort,--that the saintlier he becomes
and the riper for glory, the more he will beat his breast over what yet
abides within his breast. Yes; a man's secret opinion of himself is
almost a better test of his true spiritual state than even secret prayer.
But, then, these two are not competing and exclusive tests; they always
go together and are never found apart. And at the mouth of these two
witnesses every true hypocrite shall be condemned and every true
Christian justified.
Dr. Pusey says somewhere that the perfect hypocrite is the man who has
the truth of God in his mind, but is without the love of God in his
heart. 'Truth without love,' says that saintly scholar, 'makes a
finished Pharisee.' Now we Scottish and Free Church people believe we
have the truth, if any people on the face of the earth have it; and if we
have not love mixed with it, you see where and what we are. We are
called to display a banner because of the truth, but let love always be
our flag-staff. Let us be jealous for the truth, but let it be a godly,
that is to say, a loving jealousy. When we contend for purity of
doctrine and for purity of worship, when we protest against popery and
priestcraft, when we resist rationalism and infidelity, when we do battle
now for national religion, as we call it, and now for the freedom of the
church, let us do it all in love to all men, else we had better not do it
at all. If we cannot do it with clean and all-men-loving hearts, let us
leave all debate and contention to stronger and better men than we are.
The truth will never be advanced or guarded by us, nor will the Lord of
truth and love accept our service or bless our souls, till we put on the
divine nature, and have our hearts and our mouths still more full of love
than our minds and our mouths are full of truth. Let us watch ourselves,
lest with all our so-called love of truth we be found reprobates at last
because we loved the truth for some selfish or party end, and hated and
despised our brother, and believed all evil and disbelieved all good
concerning our brother. Truth without love makes a hypocrite, says Dr.
Pusey; and evangelical truth without evangelical love makes an
evangelical hypocrite, says Thomas Shepard. Only where the whole truth
is united to a heart full of love have we the perfect New Testament
Christian.