ntrymen, 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
is the very thing which you may hear said in England from hundreds
of pulpits every Sunday, with the mere difference, that instead of
the word law, men put the word gospel.

For this our Lord denounced them; and next, for their hypocrisy,
their play-acting, the outward show of religion in which they
delighted; trying to dress, and look, and behave differently from
other men; doing all their good works to be seen of men; sounding a
trumpet before them when they gave away alms; praying standing at
the corners of the streets; going in long clothing, making broad
their phylacteries, the written texts of Scripture which they sewed
to their garments; washing perpetually when they came from the
market, or any public place, lest they should have been defiled by
the touch of an unclean thing, or person; loving the chief seats in
their religious meetings, and the highest places at feasts; and so
forth,--full of affectation, vanity, and pride.

I could tell you other stories of their ridiculous affectations:
but I shall not. They would only make you smile: and we could not
judge them fairly, not being able to make full allowance for the
difference of customs between the Jews and ourselves. Many of the
things which our Lord blames them for, were not nearly so absurd in
Judea of old, as they seem to us in England now. Indeed, no one but
our Lord seems to have thought them absurd, or seen through the
hollowness and emptiness of them:--as he perhaps sees through, my
friends, a great deal which is thought very right in England now.
Making allowance for the difference of the country, and of the
times, the Pharisees were perhaps no more affected, for Jews, than
many people are now, for Englishmen. And if it be answered, that
though our religious fashions now-a-days are not commanded expressly
by the Bible or the Prayer Book, yet they carry out their spirit:--
remember, in God's name, that that was exactly what the Pharisees
said, and their excuse for being righteous above what was written;
and that they could, and did, quote texts of Scripture for their
phylacteries, their washings, and all their other affectations.

Another reason I have for not dwelling too much on these
affectations; and it is this. Because a man may be a play-actor and
a self-deceiver in religion, without any of these tricks