Spurgeon takes the humble marsh rush as a sustained portrait of the hypocrite's religion, tracing five points of comparison: it grows with suspicious speed and ease (true believers know struggle, doubt, and inward warfare, while the hypocrite glides along without any), it is hollow with no solid substance inside (fine in outward appearance but with no genuine faith in Christ, no real repentance, no vital union to him), it bends with every wind without a settled principle (yielding to good company and equally to bad, like the Vicar of Bray), it hangs its head in ostentatious gloom that mistakes sour formality for true piety, and it bears no fruit — all its religion is negative, a list of things not done, with nothing genuinely offered to God. He then traces what the hypocrite's religion lives on — excitement (which, when the revival cools, leaves nothing behind), human encouragement, the examples of others, the profit or respectability religion brings, worldly prosperity, and social fashion — any one of which, if dried up, causes the whole profession to wither as quickly as a rush whose marsh has run dry, and which produce in the end one of two endings: a gradual drying up in apostasy before death even comes, or a green-seeming professor cut down at the last and hearing, "I never knew you." He closes with an urgent, almost desperate plea for honest self-examination — noting with pain that it is always the truly anxious believer who fears hypocrisy and the actual hypocrite who is perfectly comfortable — before directing every sinner, genuine and counterfeit alike, to drop every work, prayer, and tear as a ground of confidence and simply look now to the thorn-crowned head and pierced hands of Christ, since there is life in a look at that crucified One for even the worst and most self-deceived of souls. Sermon delivered by Charles Spurgeon on September 24, 1865.
