Religious Duty

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SECTION III. HYPOCRISY. In the preceding section I spoke of that form of Hypocrisy which is more accurately classed as Apostasy, and consists in the profession of a creed in which we do not really believe, or the abjuration of one which in our hearts we hold to be true. Hypocrisy, as I shall here regard it, does not refer to the intellectual creed, but to the religious and moral feelings. It is the offence of pretending that we are more pious and virtuous than we know ourselves to be, or (singular paradox) of pretending that we do not feel and care about religion and duty, as in truth we do. Assuming that we are bound to love God with all our hearts, and that He, at all times, sees into those hearts, and knows whether we fulfil this obligation, it is clear enough that to act before Him the living lie of a pretended piety is, in an outrageous degree, offensive and insulting. It is unnecessary to enlarge on a topic so fully understood. The actual gross hypocrisy of the Tartuffe and the Mawworm is abhorred and condemned by every heart and tongue. Not equally recognized, however, is the guilt of some of the milder forms of this vice, wherein the simplicityof religion is still, although less grossly, violated. Nay, to many the concealment of serious religious feelings under a light demeanor is, doubtless, an act of hypocrisy done out of the very hatred of the offence in its opposite development; yet, in whatever way we falsify our true religious condition to the eyes of our fellows, must it not always involve offence before God ? Are we not bound to live out simply and uprightly before men that which He sees us to be; to acknowledge alike our heart's fealty to our liege Lord, and the miserable short-comings by which we fail in our allegiance ? In the first place, ther...