would not come to be hypocrites out and out, they must begin to avoid it
by speaking every man the truth to his neighbor. If they did not begin
at once to speak the truth, they must grow worse and worse liars. The
Lord called hypocrisy _leaven_, because of its irresistible, perhaps as
well its unseen, growth and spread; he called it the leaven _of the
Pharisees_, because it was the all-pervading quality of their being, and
from them was working moral dissolution in the nation, eating like a
canker into it, by infecting with like hypocrisy all who looked up to
them.

"Is it not a strange drift, this of men," said the curate, "to hide what
is, under the veil of what is not? to seek refuge in lies, as if that
which is not, could be an armor of adamant? to run from the daylight for
safety, deeper into the cave? In the cave house the creatures of the
night--the tigers and hyenas, the serpent and the old dragon of the
dark; in the light are true men and women, and the clear-eyed angels.
But the reason is only too plain; it is, alas! that they are themselves
of the darkness and not of the light. They do not fear their own. They
are more comfortable with the beasts of darkness than with the angels of
light. They dread the peering of holy eyes into their hearts; they feel
themselves naked and fear to be ashamed, therefore cast the garment of
hypocrisy about them. They have that in them so strange to the light
that they feel it must be hidden from the eye of day, as a thing
_hideous_, that is, a thing to be hidden. But the hypocrisy is worse
than all it would hide. That they have to hide again, as a more hideous
thing still.

"God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is _revelation_--a
casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after
truth. On and on, from fact to fact divine He advances, until at length