once in that pass out of the ranks
of the hypocrites altogether and pass over into a very different
category. Bunyan lets us see how a formalist and a hypocrite and a
Christian all respectively do when they come to a real difficulty. The
three pilgrims were all walking in the same path, and with their faces
for the time in the same direction. They had not held much conference
together since their first conversation, and as time goes on, Christian
has no more talk but with himself, and that sometimes sighingly, and
sometimes more comfortably. When, all at once, the three men come on the
hill Difficulty. A severe act of self-denial has to be done at this
point of their pilgrimage. A proud heart has to be humbled to the dust.
A second, a third, a tenth place has to be taken in the praise of men. An
outbreak of anger and wrath has to be kept under for hours and days. A
great injury, a scandalous case of ingratitude, has to be forgiven and
forgotten; in short, as Rutherford says, an
impossible-to-be-counterfeited spiritual grace has to be put into its
severest and sorest exercise; and the result was--what we know. Our
pilgrim went and drank of the spring that always runs at the bottom of
the hill Difficulty, and thus refreshed himself against that hill; while
Formalist took the one low road, and Hypocrisy the other, which led him
into a wide field full of dark mountains, where he stumbled and fell and
rose no more. When, after his visit to the spring, Christian began to go
up the hill, saying:

'This hill, though high, I covet to ascend;
The difficulty will not me offend;
For I perceive the way to life lies here;
Come, pluck up heart; let's neither faint nor fear;
Better, though difficult, the right way to go,
Than wrong, though easy, where the end is woe.'

Now, all this brings us to the last step in the evolution of a perfect
hypocrite out of a simple formalist. The perfect and finished hypocrite
is not your commonplace and vulgar scoundrel of the playwright and the
penny-novelist type; the finest hypocrite is a character their art cannot
touch. 'The worst of hypocrites,' Rutherford goes on to say, 'is he who
whitens himself till he deceives himself. It is strange that a man hath
such power over himself. But a man's heart may deceive his heart, and he
may persuade himself that he is godly and righteous when he knows nothing
about it.' 'Preaching in a certain place,' says Boston, 'after s