On the other hand, was the publican fit? That is a serious question; one which we cannot answer, without knowing more about him than our Lord has chosen to tell us. Many a person is ready enough, in these days, to cry ‘God be merciful to me a sinner!’ who is fit, I fear, neither to come to the Communion, nor to stay away either. It was not so, I suppose, with the old Jews in our Lord’s time. The Pharisees then were hard legalists, who stood all on works; and, therefore, if a man broke off from them, and threw himself on God’s grace and mercy, he did it in a simple, honest, effectual way, like this publican. But now, I am sorry to say, our Pharisees have contrived to make themselves as proud and self-righteous about their own faith and repentance, as the Jewish Pharisees did about their own works and observances; and there has risen up in England and elsewhere a very ugly new hypocrisy. People now-a-days are too apt to pride themselves on their own convictions of sin, and their own repentance, till they trust in their repentance to save them, and not in Christ, just as the Pharisee trusted in his works to save him, and not in Christ; and when they pray, I cannot help fearing (for I am sure many of their religious books teach them it) that they pray very much like that Pharisee, ‘God, I thank thee that I am not as other men are, carnal, unconverted, unconvinced of sin, nor even as that plain, moral, respectable man. I am convinced of sin; I am converted; I have the right frames, and the right feelings, and the right experiences.’ Oh, of all the cunning snares of the devil, that I think is the cunningest. Well says the old proverb—‘The devil is old, and therefore he knows many things.’ In old times he made men trust in their own righteousness: and that was snare enough; now he has learnt how to make men actually trust in their own sinfulness, and so turn the grace of God into a cloak of pride, and contempt of their fellow-creatures.