Crossword-Solution: HOODWINKS 9 letters, 5 clues 🏆 scrabble score: 20

The man who is a brute to his wife goes meekly to his seat; the miser, who has six days pinched his tenants or evicted them, passes the collection plate, his face benevolent; the woman whose tongue is that of the liar and the gossip, who has done her best to smirch the reputation of her nearest neighbor, lifts her eyes heavenward and follows every word of a sermon she can not comprehend; and the man or woman who has stepped aside actually believes that his or her presence in church hoodwinks every one.

The heroine will be an exquisite Columbine, her lover a dainty Harlequin, her father a picturesque Pantaloon, and the valet who hoodwinks the father and brings about the happiness of the lovers a grotesque but perfectly tasteful Punchinello or Mascarille or Sganarelle.

But should he happen to get a country squire into his clutches who grinds down his peasants like cattle, or some gold-laced villain, who warps the law to his own purposes, and hoodwinks the eyes of justice with his gold, or any chap of that kidney; then, my boy, he is in his element, and rages like a very devil, as if every fibre in his body were a fury.

Yet God seems to occupy a quite hermetically sealed compartment of the universe; for His servant in London shamelessly goes on with the game he is playing, and appears to take a pride in the very conscience he systematically hoodwinks.

This, together with self-love, which always hoodwinks the mind, and will not suffer a serious impartial examination of a man’s self, these, I say, are the bottom of this vain persuasion, that possesseth the generality of men.