ances were against tlieni ; the Pharisee who had used his religious position to cover worldly ends was shown to want it, though all appearances were in his favour. AVhile the publican came to the light, the Pharisee hated the truth and sought to repress it, and to do so sought to destroy Him who spoke the truth. Thus he showed himself of his father the devil, who from the beginning was a murderer as well as the father of lies. Here in John then we have juggling with truth, hypocrisies before God and the world and one's own soul, set forth as the cardinal sin which relates us as cer- tainly to the spirit of evil as faith does to the spirit of good, and which works in hate, as surely as goodness works in love, and which leaves men to die in their sins, because it is hostile to all that could lead to penitence and pardon.
All this is in essential agreement with what the Synoptics say of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost (Mt 12~-3', Mk 3="-*, Lk 12'-i=). The Pharisees had reached a turning-point in their opposition. They believed in miracles, they looked for signs. The miracle could no longer be ques- tioned, but they could call it a sign of Beelzebub. Though unable to deny either the power or the beneficence of Christ's work, being resolved not to accept the practical consequences of belief, they call light darkness and good evil. The actual sin against the Holy Ghost, therefore, is possible only when face to face with the highest thing in religion and its clearest evidence, but the danger of com- ing to that point is present in all hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is ever an overweening pride, denying to other men the right to truth, and to God His power to see ; and the eternal sin is only the finished result of what is always present in it. This con- nexion is most evident in the narrative of Luke, which begins with a warning against the leaven of the Pharisees which is hypocrisy. Nothing, it is said, can be covered, and the hypocrite has power to do only one great evU — to associate others in his spiritual destruction. Faith in the God who cares even for the sparrow can alone preserve from this fatal vice, a clear indication that hypocrisy is the negation of faith, or at least that faith is the negation of hypocrisy. The natural outcome of faith is confession before men, and the accompani- ment of that is Divine protection until the day of the final award. On the other hand, to follow hypocrisy is to go the road that leads to the blasphemy^ against the Holy Ghost — the state of mind that has so juggled with good and evil that good has no power over it, the sin which no change of dispensation, or perhaps nothing in eternity anj' more than in time, can modify. This may be most apparent in Luke, but in Mark and Matthew also the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of truth, and the sin which is eternal is not an act of over- sight or passion, but an irremediable state which could 1» reached only by a finished, proud, and tyrannical hypocrisy. See Unpardonable Sin.
In evei-y form of evil, as Martensen rightly affirms, hypocrisy is present in a partial form. All sin is egoistic, yet every man depends on society — the sinner not least. Under some pre- tence of goodness alone can the egoist enter society. "The .seducer must swear false oaths, the deceiver feign friendship, the tyrant profess care for the commonweal. A finished life of wickedness would be one great lie, which would be the only ultimate form of atheism. And just because a God of truth cannot for ever be denied, hypocrisy comes to be more and more a spirit of hatred and opposition to truth. Thus it is, more even than hnhit, the cumulative element in devotion to evil. It is not only the greatest practical denial of God, it is also the greatest practical alienation from God. To be reconciled to God is primarily to be
HYPOCRISY
restored to tiutli. Wherefore liypocrisy may be taken not only as the negation of all Christ taught of God, but also as the negation of all Christ did to reconcile men to the Father, the negation of His work as a Saviour as well as of His work as a Bevealer.
Throughout all the Christian centuries, wherever there has been a lively sense of the reality of Christianity, there has also been a lively sense of this shadow following the sun. The classical example of lying to the Holy Ghost found its occasion in the first Bush of the Church's faith and love (Ac 5). The first great division of parties arose through the same vice, and arose almost with the Church's beginnings. The extreme bit- terness of the Judaistic party was nourished by that external view of religion which could regard a ceremony as essential, and hatred as if it were godliness. Even Barnabas was almost carried away by their hypocrisy (Gal 2'^), showing how the vice seeks to deceive, if possible, the elect ; while their attempts to suppress Paul were limited only by their power and never by their scruples— showin" that it is a vice which always persecutes as well as perverts. All the errors whicli cause men to fall away from the faith are, already in the NT, ascribed to the hypocrisy of men that speak lies (1 Ti 4^). Regarding this root of error in moral falsehood, and not in mere intellectual mistake, much might be said, but it must suffice to mention what Augustine says of Manichi-eism. Long his difficulties seemed to him intellectual perplexity about the origin of evil. When, however, he saw that wickedness was no substance, but a perversity of the will, he discovered the true root of the error.