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.'