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It was very wrong of him to love somebody else's wife, and to sponge thus on affections which belonged to another; but then he had nothing puritanical or pharisaical in his nature; he was too highly cultivated to be moral, and arguing the point in the mood of sweet Barbara, he had often succeeded in persuading pretty women that he did right in loving them, though their household duties belonged to another.
They always were, from first to last, narrow, pedantic, one-sided, legal, technical, pharisaical. The best thing about them, in the days of their declining power, was that they always opposed infidel sentiments. They hated Voltaire and Rousseau and the Encyclopedists as much as they did Luther and Calvin.
How gentle, and yet how searching, are his rebukes of self-complacent respectability, holding it responsible, in spite of all its decent seemings, for much of the depravity which it condemned with Pharisaical harshness!
"Did you ever," said he to Major Bellenden, "see such an absurd automaton? One would swear it moves upon springs Can it speak, think you?" "O, ay," said the Major; "that seems to be one of my old acquaintance, a genuine puritan of the right pharisaical leaven. Stay he coughs and hems; he is about to summon the Castle with the but-end of a sermon, instead of a parley on the trumpet."
'And yet that reverend gentleman, said Pleydell, 'whom I love for his father's sake and his own, has nothing of the sour or pharisaical pride which has been imputed to some of the early fathers of the Calvinistic Kirk of Scotland.
Of what avail are creed and dogma and ritual, when we ourselves "bow the knee to pomp that loves to varnish guilt"? Of what avail our benevolence that offers, not the Christ-touch of pity and understanding, but the bitter bread of craven servitude and Pharisaical condescension, that says "thou art vile and lost for all time?" We laud the wanton because she has wealth and power.
The devotees could in general be distinguished from the country folks by their Pharisaical and penitential visages, as well as by their not wearing shoes; for the Stations to such places were formerly made with bare feet: most persons now, however, content themselves with stripping off their shoes and stockings on coming within the precincts of the holy ground.
What right have you to set yourself up to judge other people in that pharisaical manner? It is a most unchristian spirit.
A pharisaical austerity rendered him redoubtable by the license he assumed in his public reprimands, whether to plaintiffs, or defendants, advocates or magistrates; so that there was not a single person who did not tremble to have to do with him.
Moreover, there are some who think that these words were spoken by Christ against the Pharisees ironically, as if He meant to say: Aye, my dear lords, rob and steal, and then go and give alms, and you will be promptly cleansed, so that Christ would in a somewhat sarcastic and mocking way puncture their pharisaical hypocrisy.
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