n he confesses his sins he counts and calls them deeper than those of
others; when he recounts the benefits he has received from God, he says
that they are greater than others have enjoyed. Glad praise and weeping
confession correspond to each other in a true heart, as correspond the
height of the sky and the depth of its shadow in still waters. When the
clouds above you become high, the shadow of them beneath you becomes
correspondingly deep. The same man who said, "I am chief of sinners,"
said also, "Thanks be to God for his unspeakable gift."

It is not, then, for what he has said that the Pharisee is condemned,
even when he announces that he is not as other men. If conscious of
unworthiness, and amazed at God's long-suffering, he had exclaimed, I am
not like other men--I have been spared and instructed, and invited and
taught and led with a paternal tenderness that others do not enjoy, his
thanksgiving would have been sweet incense as it rose to the throne of
the Most High. He presumes to give thanks not for what he has received,
but for what he is and does. Here lies his condemnation. It is not in
the thanks but in the reason for the thanks that the old serpent lurks;
he is delighted not with what God has graciously bestowed on him, but
with what he has meritoriously given to God.

The sense in the original is more comprehensive than that which the
English conveys; other men here mean all others. On one side he places
himself, and on the other side the rest of human kind: the result of the
comparison in his judgment is that he is better than all.

Three of the more articulate and manifest forms of wickedness he
enumerates, in order by the contrast to set forth his own purity.
"Extortioners" are officials having a right to something, who unjustly
force from an oppressed people more than is due; the "unjust" are those
who deal unfairly in the ordinary intercourse of life; and adulterers
are, in fact, and were then accounted the deepest and most daring
transgressors of the laws both human and divine. Probably the Pharisee
was in point of fact free in his conduct from all these vices; there is
nothing in the parable that forbids us in these matters to take him at
his word.

Instead of extending the list of vices of which he felt himself free, he
cuts the matter short by a general comparison between himself and the
publican. The contempt in which the tax-farmers were held by the
stricter Jews shines out in every page