A New Definition by Editor

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · May 28, 1894

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 20, No. 29.

A New Definition.

By Editor

Hypocrisy is defined to be “the practice of supporting a character different from what is real; dissimulation with regard to the moral or religious character.” But the late Honorable W. C. P. Breckenridge, in confessing to his constituents the sin cloaked for so many years under religious and high moral profession, said, as reported in the San Francisco Examiner of May 6:—

“It has not been hypocrisy that my life has not been consistently wrong; I knew the secret sin; I tried to atone for it in ways that it is not becoming in me to more than allude to.”

But does not every hypocrite know in some sense his sin? When the hardened hypocrites came before Christ bringing the adulterous woman, and he stooped down and wrote on the ground the very sins of which they were guilty and which their cloak of sanctity could not hide from him, they knew their sin, and went out self-condemned without casting a stone. They may have attempted to “atone” for their sins by branding the woman. The utterance quoted above shows utter ignorance of Christianity. He, the sinner, atoning for the sin! Only Christ can do that. Again he says that when someone writes this history—

“whatever blame may attach to me, he may write of me that even with that blame he loved the poor; he toiled for his fellow-men; he labored for good causes, loyal to principles and faithful to truth—devoted to you.”

We do not condemn Colonel Breckenridge, that rests with God, but the above words show that the knowledge which indicted them is not the knowledge of an intelligent Protestant Christian. It is the plea of self.