THE MOTE-HUNTER.

ERE we behold a picture of optical surgery at the hands of a hypocrite. It was one of the sins of infinitesimal iniquity, of microscopic turpitude, among the Pharisees; and this species of Pharisaism has an abundant and luxuriant reproduction in this and every other age. "Why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Or how wilt thou say to thy brother, Let me pull out the mote out of thine eye; and, behold, a beam is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then thou shalt see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye." This is the preceptive portrait which Jesus drew of this species of hypocrisy; and the picture I have drawn as an illustration of it shows an old, hump-backed, long-faced, crookednosed hypocrite complacently and cruelly picking a mote out of his neighbor's eye, while a beam protrudes visibly from his own. He is giving his victim all the pain he can, and the poor fellow undergoes about the same torture that a person does when he gets a railroad cinder extracted by the optician, after having been made to feel the misery of the same for about three days. The hypocrite takes particular

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pains to make us keenly sensible of the mote in our eye long before he would extract it; and when he goes to take it out he puts his instrument into the very socket of your eye. If you notice, he is left-handed in the operation; and I want to lay down the proverb: ■The mote-hunter always goes for your eye with his sinister hand. He is both mean and awkward about it, and he aims to hurt you all he can.

The mote-hunter is by far the most microscopic of all the animalcule species. He is always in a small business, expecting to produce big results. His cap

ital consists in mites, and he has the refined and exquisite faculty of producing more to the amount invested than any other man engaged in the business of meanness. He is narrow between his sunken eyes; his forehead is deep, contracted, and sloping; his nose is long and crooked; his chin turns up to meet its aquiline brother; his jaws are hollow, and his cheekbones prominent; his lips are thin, and his mouth is meretricious. He is a little man, and he deals in little things; and, being a hypocrite, he never troubles about big things in others, however big or monstrous his own sins. His proclivities are such that no lions ever lie in his path; but he hunts bugs and kills insects. He would stand and stamp the life out of chigoes for an hour at a time. Elephants, tigers, hyenas, these never seem to occur to his weasel-intellect; and condors, eagles, buzzards, they never fly in the atmosphere of his contracted brain. His name is little Tomtit, Titmouse, Titcomb; and, being a hypocrite, he hunts among the grass, not for worms and grasshoppers, but for invisible insects. He could not swallow a June-bug at all, and an ordinary house-fly would choke him to death. He is a "small potato,"

and rotten at that; and there is no language which can properly caricature his littleness and meanness.

In business this old hypocrite is a "skinflint," and, as it is quaintly and vulgarly expressed, "he would skin a flea for his hide and tallow." He is "penny wise and pound foolish;" and he deals in coppers and petty cash accounts alone. No trust nor confidence does he repose in his fellow-man, especially in small things; and he never has any thing big to deal in. He treats God in the same way he treats his fellow-man in business, if he is in the Church—and he almost always is-and when he gives, he peels off the ragged ten-cent bill from his little roll, or puts in the nickel with a hole in it, palmed off upon him by somebody at last, after twenty years' effort to cheat him. He claims that all he has belongs to God, but that he must take care of the Lord's money; and hence he can stand with unabashed countenance and emotional indifference before the broad charity and generous liberality of others. He spits in the fire when it consumes the coal too fast, and his economy would steal the oats from his own horse. It is said that one such was a deacon-member of a Baptist Church in Tennessee some years ago. He was noted for his pretended piety and for his merciless penuriousness. His pastor had preached a year for his Church, and had received nothing. He arose one Sunday morning, at the close of a sermon, and stated that he was in need of money, food, clothing, and that the Church owed him and did not pay him. The old hypocritical deacon arose in reply, and said: "Go on, pastor, and preach the gospel; and Paul says, "They that preach the gospel shall live of the gospel.' The Lord will give you souls for your hire." "Yes," said the pastor, "I