All, I say, have their forms and ceremonies; and all are in danger, as we churchmen are, of making those forms stand instead of true religion. In the Church or out of the Church, men are all tempted to have, like the Pharisees, their traditions of the elders, their little rules as to conduct, over and above what the Bible and the Prayer-book have commanded; and all are tempted to be more shocked if those rules are broken, than if really wrong and wicked things are done; and like the Pharisees of old, to be careful in paying tithe of mint, anise, and cummin, the commonest garden herbs, and yet forget the weighty matters of the law, justice, mercy, and judgment. I have known those who would be really more shocked at seeing a religious man dance or sing, than at hearing him tell a lie. But I will give no examples, lest I should set you on judging others. Or rather, the only example which I will give is that of these Pharisees, who have become, by our Lord's words about them, famous to all time, as hypocrites. Now you must bear in mind that these Pharisees were not villains and profligates. Many people, feeling, perhaps, how much of what the Lord had said against the Pharisees would apply to them, have tried to escape from that ugly thought, by making out the Pharisees worse men than our Lord does. But the fact is, that they cannot be proved to be worse than too many religious people now-a-days. There were adulterers, secret loose-livers among them. Are there none now-a- days? They were covetous. Are no religious professors covetous now-a-days? They crept into widows' houses, and, for a pretence made long prayers. Does no one do so now? There would, of course, be among them, as there is among all large religious parties, as there is now, a great deal of inconsistent and bad conduct. But, on the whole, there is no reason to suppose that the greater number of them were what we should call ill-livers. In that terrible twenty- third chapter of St. Matthew, in which our Lord denounces the sins of the Scribes and Pharisees, he nowhere accuses them of profligate living; and the Pharisee of whom he tells us in his parable, who went into the Temple to pray, no doubt spoke truth when he boasted of not being as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers. He trusted in himself that he was righteous. True. But whatever that means, it means that he thought that he was righteous, after a fashion, though it proved to be a wrong one. What our Lord complains of in them is, first, their hardness of heart; their pride in themselves, and their contempt for their fellowmen. Their very name Pharisee meant that. It meant separate--they were separate from mankind; a peculiar people; who alone knew the law, with whom alone God was pleased: while the rest of mankind, even of their own countrymen, knew not the law, and were accursed, and doomed to hell. Ah God, who are we to cast stones at the Pharisees of old, when this