In "Miscellaneous Writings," page 234, our Leader tells us that "what hinders man's progress is his vain conceit, the Phariseeism of the times." On page 356 she gives us this rule: "One can never go up, until one has gone down in his own esteem."
I heard a Christian Science student make the remark that it took her three years to find out that she was a Pharisee. This impressed me so forcibly that I began to wonder if I were a Pharisee and did not know it. It has taken me nearly nine years to learn that I am a Pharisee.
What are Pharisees? In Jesus' time they were personalities of self-righteousness, egotism, vanity, pride, and hypocrisy. Jesus was constantly rebuking them and pronouncing woes upon them. They were ever on the watch to catch him in his words that they might accuse him. They were very ready to criticise his keeping of the Sabbath. To them eating with publicans and sinners, or with unwashen hands, was very defiling. They were strict in keeping of forms and paying tithes, while they "omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith" (Matthew, 23:23).
