come downstairs or to cross the street—­he steps on the doorstep that is not there and misses the real one.  He is involved in false appearances at every turn.  And so it is in the moral world—­there is one real, however many unreals there are, and to trust to the unreal is to come to grief on the real.  “The beginning of a man’s doom,” wrote Carlyle, “is that vision be withdrawn from him.”  “Thou blind Pharisee!” (Matt. 23:26).  The cup is clean enough without; it is septic and poisonous within—­and from which side of it do you drink, outside or inside? (Matt. 23:25).  As we study the teaching of Jesus here, we see anew the profundity of the saying attributed to him in the Fourth Gospel, “The truth shall make you free” (John 8:32).  The man with astigmatism, or myopia, or whatever else it is, must get the glasses that will show him the real world, and he is safe, and free to go and come as he pleases.  See the real in the moral sphere, and the first great peril is gone.  Nothing need be said at this point of the Pharisee who used righteousness and long prayers as a screen for villainy.  Probably his doom was that in the end he came to think his righteousness and his prayers real, and to reckon them as credit with a God, who did not see through them any more than he did himself.  It is a mistake to over-emphasize here the devouring of widow’ houses by the Pharisee (Matt. 23:14), for it was no peculiar weakness of his; publicans and unjust judges did the same.  Only the publican and the unjust judge told themselves no lies about it.  The Pharisee lied—­lying to oneself or lying to another, which is the worse?  The more dangerous probably is lying to oneself, though the two practices generally will go together in the long run.  The worst forms of lying, then, are lying to oneself and lying about God; and the Pharisee combined them, and told himself that, once God’s proper dues of prayer and tithe were paid, his treatment of the widow and her house was correct.  Hence, says Jesus, he receives “greater damnation” (A.V.)—­or judgement on a higher scale ("perissoteron krima").

The Pharisees were men who believed in God—­only that with his world, they re-created him (as we are all apt to do for want of vision or by choice); but what is atheism, what can it be, but indifference to God’s facts and to God’s nature?  If religion is union with God, in the phrase we borrow so slightly from the mystics, how can a man be in union with God, when the god he sees is not there, is a figment of his own mind, something different altogether from God?  Or, if we use the phrase of the Old Testament. prophet and of Jesus himself, if religion is vision of God, what is our religion, if after all we are not seeing God at all, but something else—­a dummy god, like that of the Pharisees, some trifling martinet who can be humbugged—­or, to come to ourselves, a majestic bundle of abstract nouns loosely tied up in impersonality?  For all such Jesus has a caution.  Indifference to God’s