day we have become so, in the strictest sense of the
word; and consider the spectacle of a flourishing tradesman, anything but
scrupulous in his methods of business, who loses no opportunity of
bidding all mankind to regard him as a religious and moral exemplar. This
is the actual show of things with us; this is the England seen by our
bitterest censors. There is an excuse for those who charge us with
"hypocrisy."

But the word is ill-chosen, and indicates a misconception. The
characteristic of your true hypocrite is the assumption of a virtue which
not only he has not, but which he is incapable of possessing, and in
which he does not believe. The hypocrite may have, most likely has, (for
he is a man of brains,) a conscious rule of life, but it is never that of
the person to whom his hypocrisy is directed. Tartufe incarnates him
once for all. Tartufe is by conviction an atheist and a sensualist; he
despises all who regard life from the contrasted point of view. But
among Englishmen such an attitude of mind has always been extremely rare;
to presume it in our typical money-maker who has edifying sentiments on
his lips is to fall into a grotesque error of judgment. No doubt that
error is committed by the ordinary foreign journalist, a man who knows
less than little of English civilization. More enlightened critics, if
they use the word at all, do so carelessly; when speaking with more
precision, they call the English "pharisaic"--and come nearer the truth.

Our vice is self-righteousness. We are essentially an Old Testament
people; Christianity has never entered into our soul we see ourselves as
the Chosen, and by no effort of spiritual aspiration can attain unto
humility. In this there is nothing hypocritic. The blatant upstart who
builds a church, lays out his money in that way not merely to win social
consideration; in his curious little soul he believes (so far as he can
believe anything) that what he has done is pleasing to God and beneficial
to mankind. He may have lied and cheated for every sovereign he
possesses; he may have polluted his life with uncleanness; he may have
perpetrated many kinds of cruelty and baseness--but all these things has
he done against his conscience, and, as soon as the opportunity comes, he
will make atonement for them in the way suggested by such faith as he
has, the way approved by public opinion. His religion, strictly defined,
is _an ineradicable belief in his own religi