A HYPOCRITE

Is a gilded pill, composed of two virtuous ingredients, natural
dishonesty and artificial dissimulation. Simple fruit, plant, or drug he
is none, but a deformed mixture bred betwixt evil nature and false art
by a monstrous generation, and may well be put into the reckoning of
those creatures that God never made. In Church or commonwealth (for in
both these this mongrel weed will shoot) it is hard to say whether he be
physic or a disease, for he is both in divers respects.

As he is gilt with an outside of seeming purity, or as he offereth
himself to you to be taken down in a cup or taste of golden zeal and
simplicity, you may call him physic. Nay, and never let potion give
patient good stool if, being truly tasted and relished, he be not as
loathsome to the stomach of any honest man.

He is also physic in being as commodious for use as he is odious in
taste, if the body of the company into which he is taken can make true
use of him. For the malice of his nature makes him so
informer-like-dangerous, in taking advantage of anything done or said,
yea, even to the ruin of his makers, if he may have benefit, that such a
creature in a society makes men as careful of their speeches and actions
as the sight of a known cut-purse in a throng makes them watchful over
their purses and pockets. He is also in this respect profitable physic,
that his conversation being once truly tasted and discovered, the
hateful foulness of it will make those that are not fully like him to
purge all such diseases as are rank in him out of their own lives, as
the sight of some citizens on horseback make a judicious man amend his