William Burkitt on Luke 11:44

Another woe is here denounced against the Pharisees, for cheating and deceiving the people with an outward show and appearance of piety and religion. They were like graves and sepulchres grown over with grass, which though they held dead men's bones, yet the putrefaction not outwardly appearing, men walked unawares over them, and so were polluted by them, intimating, that the inward rottenness and filthy corruptions of the Pharisees not appearing unto men, the people were easily deceived by outward shows of Pharisaical sanctity, and so fell into a dangerous imitation of them.

Learn thence, that the great design of hypocrites is to cheat the world with an empty show of piety: the hypocrite's ambition is to be thought good, not to be so.

Learn, 2. That nothing is more fatally dangerous to the souls of men, and draws persons to an admiration and imitation of hypocritical professors, like their outward shows of sanctity, and their extraordinary appearances of devotion and piety. This it was that gained the Pharisees such a veneration and esteem among the people, that it became a proverb among them. "If but two men went to heaven, the one must be a Pharisee." But their counterfeit piety being double iniquity, they did receive for it double damnation.