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He showed himself. They were waiting for him. Christophe had made no secret of his feelings. Since he had become aware of German Pharisaism, which refuses to see things as they are, he had made it a law for himself that he should be absolutely, continually, uncompromisingly sincere in everything without regard for anything or anybody or himself.
Events and discourses found in Luke ix. 51 to xviii. 14, which probably belong after the confession of Peter, and very likely to some stage of the journey to Jerusalem: Woes against the Pharisees, uttered at a Pharisee's table Luke xi. 37-54. Warnings against the spirit of pharisaism Luke xii. 1-59. Comment on the slaughter of Galileans by Pilate Luke xiii. 1-9.
And in despite of the foes without and within that have wrought her woe of the Pharisaism that is a mask for fraud, of the mammon-worship cloaked as respectability, of scepticism lightly mocking, of the bolder enmity of the blasphemer we cannot contemplate the story of Christianity throughout our epoch, even in these islands and this empire, without seeing that the advance of the Faith is real and constant, the advance of the rising tide, and that her seeming defeats are but the deceptive reflux of the ever-mounting waves.
One of the beneficent lessons of the present war has been to moderate our claims in this respect. It has revealed us to ourselves as nothing else in history has ever done, and it has revealed, among other things, that moral progress is not nearly so advanced as we thought it was. It has been a terrible blow to the pharisaism of which I have just spoken.
Why should the cloth as it is so ingenuously called be touched with delicate hands, unless it be that it is shoddy? Yet the man who would stand well in the eyes of society must not whisper a word against pharisaism; for the Pharisee is a highly respectable person, and observes the proprieties; he typifies the conventional righteousness and religion of his time.
Yet it held his own peculiar quality, which is not that of American fun, quality of a brilliant intellectuality: the keenness of a rapier, a teasing subtlety, a contempt for pharisaism and squeamishness, and above all a fine philosophy.
If I supposed it possible that my voice should ever reach our late critic, whose good sense and good spirit Americans appreciate, and whose name they would be glad to honor if everything English had not become suspicious to us, the possible synonyme of Pharisaism or stupidity, I should recommend to him Lord Chesterfield's assertion, that a man's own good breeding is the best security against other people's bad manners.
He is one of the neglected great men of Scripture. He was no prophet, he had no glowing words, he had no lofty visions, he had no special commission, he did not live in the heroic age. There was a certain harshness and dryness; a tendency towards what, when it was more fully developed, became Pharisaism, in the man, which somewhat covers the essential nobleness of his character.
The proof of this statement, if proof be needed, is that legalism, when its master principle has been fully grasped and fearlessly applied, takes the form of Pharisaism, and that it is possible for the Pharisee to "count himself to have apprehended," to congratulate himself on his spiritual achievement, to believe, in all seriousness, that he has closed his account with God.
Shakespeare may at first seem an example to the contrary; and indeed is it not a standing marvel that the greatest writer of a nation that is distinguished among all nations for the pharisaism, puritanism, and unimaginative narrowness of its judgments on conduct and type of character, should be paramount over all writers for the breadth, maturity, fulness, subtlety, and infinite variousness of his conception of human life and nature?
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