in the soul. There were present about a score of villagers, and
the party from the house.

Clad in no vestments of office, but holding in his hand the New
Testament, which was always held either there or in his pocket, Wingfold
rose to speak. He read:

"_Beware ye of the leaven of the Pharisees, which is hypocrisy. For
there is nothing covered, that shall not be revealed; neither hid, that
shall not be know_."

Then at once he began to show them, in the simplest interpretation, that
the hypocrite was one who pretended to be what he was not; who tried or
consented to look other and better than he was. That a man, from
unwillingness to look at the truth concerning himself, might be but
half-consciously assenting to the false appearance, would, he said,
nowise serve to save him from whatever of doom was involved in this
utterance of our Lord concerning the crime. These words of explanation
and caution premised, he began at the practical beginning, and spoke a
few forceful things on the necessity of absolute truth as to fact in
every communication between man and man, telling them that, so far as he
could understand His words recorded, our Lord's objection to swearing
lay chiefly in this, that it encouraged untruthfulness, tending to make
a man's yea less than yea, his nay other than nay. He said that many
people who told lies every day, would be shocked when they discovered
that they were liars; and that their lying must be discovered, for the
Lord said so. Every untruthfulness was a passing hypocrisy, and if they
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