9 Sermon Illustrations on Hypocrisy And Sin

Censoriousness is a compound of many of the worst passions, — latent pride, which discovers the mote in our brother's eye, but hides the beam in our own; malignant envy, which, wounded at the noble talents and superior prosperity of others, transforms them into the objects and food of its malice, if possible, obscuring the splendor it is too base to emulate; disguised hatred, which diffuses, in its perpetual mutterings, the irritable venom of the heart; servile duplicity, which fulsomely praises to the face, and blackens behind the back; shameless levity, which sacrifices the peace and reputation of the absent, merely to give barbarous stings to a jocular conversation; altogether forming an aggregate the most desolating on earth, and nearest in character to the malice of hell. E. L. Magoon.

The Spaniards, by their cruelty to the natives of the Island of Cuba, rendered themselves odious, and excited in the minds of the inhabitants the strongest prejudices against their religion. A chief who had been condemned to be burnt, when brought to the stake, was exhorted to embrace Christianity, assured that thereby he would be admitted to heaven. The chief asked if there were any Spaniards in heaven. "Yes," said the priest who attended him; "but they are all good ones." The chief replied, "I cannot bring myself to go to a place where I should meet with but one: therefore do not speak to me any more of your religion, but let me die." Whitecross.

A profane father in one of the New England States, one day learned that his little son had uttered some blasphemous expressions—doubtless a second edition of his own. But the father had no fancy for having his child coming forward so fast in his own footsteps. He called the child to account for his vicious conduct—reproved him severely for his profanity, and then commenced whipping him and scolding him at the time. While whipping his son for his profanity, he swore several profane oaths himself!

Two Greeks, notorious for their piracies and other crimes, were, in 1829, tried and condemned, and three days after executed at Malta. In the course of the trial, it appeared that the beef and anchovies, on board one of the English vessels which they pirated, were left untouched, and the circumstances under which they were left appeared to the court so peculiar, that the culprits were asked the cause of it. They promptly answered that it was at the time of the great fast, when their church ate neither meat nor fish. They appeared to be most hardened and abandoned wretches, enemies alike to their own and every other nation, and yet rigidly maintaining their religious character: and while they were robbing, plundering, and murdering and stealing the women and children of their countrymen, and selling them to the Turks, and committing other atrocious deeds, they would have us understand that they were not so wicked as to taste meat or fish, when prohibited by the canons of their church! Had a single drop of the blood of the murdered been, by means of the blows inflicted, spattered on their lips, and thus by chance passed into their mouth, they would probably have felt in continual danger of the fire that shall never be quenched, until they could have visited some church, confessed and done penance for having tasted something of an animal nature in the season of a fast. I do not know, indeed, says Mr. Goodell, that they would have manifested such ignorance and superstition, but it would have given me no surprise to hear that they did; and moreover, that they derived their principal hopes of success, in their villainous and horrid traffic, from a strict attention to the requirements of their religion.