' 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.
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