513. Is It Possible for One to Be Over-righteous ?

Commentators interpret the phrase "righteous overmuch" (Ecc 7:16) as descriptive of religious presumption; of that self-made righteousness which would lay the greatest stress upon outward performances and would claim personal credit for results which the true believer recognizes as the gift of divine grace alone. Pharisaism, with its hypocritical assumption of superior virtue, its multitudinous observances and its devotion to form and ceremonial, forgetting the "things of the spirit," was the type of the over-righteous.