The evening telegraph. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1864-1918, 1869-10-14

had at first embraced only under conpuisiou.
But what was their state of mind when they
made ;bcirbrst profession? We suspect that in
many cases men found il possible to work
themselves into a state in which they could
profess their new creed without any conscious
lying. IL was a very strong case of making
the best Of a bad bargain Many no doubt
relapsed they either were shamming at the
time Ot then profession, or else the Artificial
excitement wore off, and they fell back on
their former and more natural state of mind.
But there are quite cases enough of compul-
sory converts cleaving steadily to their new
faith TO show that the state of mind which
we have supposed is not an impossible one
We may now change the venue from mat
ters Of belief TO matters Of morals, and take
the case which we put before of detected
sinner. We have known such cases; and we
have known the outcry made, What hypO-
crite he is! Now there is really no need to
call him anything of the kind. IL is very
likely that he simply is, what most men are
more or less, inconsistent and imperfect. lie
has a conscience, but he does not always
obey it, He knows what is right; he says, if
need be he teaches, what is right; but he does
not always follow his own precepts. We are
not defending him; we are only saying that
his fault is a different fault from that of hypo-
crisy. To have q conscience, but not always
to obey it, is, in different degrees, the moral
state of the vast mass of mankind. II is the
state of all save 1--WE suppose) few unusually
sanity people at one end, and 1--WE suppose)
n few desperately wicked ones at the other
end. TO be very inconsistent and very i'm
perfect, and to be aware of one IS inconsistency
and imperfection, whatever it is, is certainly
not hypocrisy. Steele was no hypocrite when
he wrote the Christian Hero Leading a
vicious life, and wishing to cure himself of
his vices, he took the somewhat strange
means of shaning himself by writing and
publishing book in which he described q
model OF ideal piety and virtue. Such a
course directly drew attention to his vices.
But neither would he necessarily have been a
hypocrite if he had striven to hide his vices
from the world. Ii is rather hard to say that
a man., is pretending to be better than he is
simply because he does not wish his imper-
fections to be found out. 10 take very
strong case, we could never quite Join in the
outcry against the Papal Legate in Henry the
First's time who harangued against the mar
riage of the clergy in the morning and was
caught in "a very discreditable position in the
evening. We are far from defending him;
all we say is that his sin of the evening does
not prove his zeal Of the morning
to have been insincere. Ney, he might
possibly have argued-'I acknowledge
my transgression and | regret it; / am ever
passions; but meanwhile | am zealously
serving the Church. But you married priests
are always thinking Of your wives and chill
dren, and do not serve the Church at all. -
The weaknesses and Inconsistencies of men
are endless: let them have all their fair share
of blame; but let them not be indiscrimi-
nately called by name which does not be-
long to all of them. A man is guilty of a
particular vice who is perhaps, an enthusiast
against some other vice very likely not worse
than his own. Let him have the fair measure
of blame for his own error, but do not let
his zeal for virtue in another quarter be set
down as insincere. Let him not even be
suspected of trying to atone for the vices
to which he is inclined by abstaining from
those to which he is not inclined. Nay more,
mems minds and consciences are often
SO strangely twisted, there is such power
of what Mr.. Lecky calls ''localizing' princi-
pies and feelings, that man will be indig-
nant against this or that form Of a particular
vice while he practises other forms of it with
out scruple. Such man is fagrantly incon-
sistent; we should press the point of his in
consistency as a special argument to convince
him, but we should not think of charging
him with insincerity simply because he is in
consistent and imperfect. We have often
heard, and we have always been panied to
hear, really good actions attributed to bad
motives simply because the life of the actor
was open to objection on other grounds. We
will not enter into the theological nature of
sin, and the doctrine that he who offends in
one point is guilty Of ALL Such is at least
not the doctrine of natural morality, which
certainly welcomes whatever is good in any
man, even though it may he mixed up with
much that is bad.
All the cases which we have mentioned
seem to us quite distinct from hypocrisy in
the usual sense. In the former class of cases,
where man is certainly acting an artificial,
though not necessarily dishonest, part, the
word may be applied in a certain sense. To
cases of mere inconsistency and imperfection,
however glaring, it should not be applied at
all. Strict hypocrisy, the conscious and de-
hberate pretense to virtues which man has
not and does not care to have, is, we suspect,
much rarer than people commonly think,
PERE HYAClNTHE.