rest, to watch over the child, and to help and advise its father and
mother in guiding and training it: but not by interfering with a
parent's rights, God forbid! or by drawing away the child's
affections from its own flesh and blood; for if a child be not
taught first to honour its father and mother, there is little use in
teaching it anything else whatsoever; and a godfather's first duty
is to see that his godchild obeys its earthly parents for the Lord's
sake, for that is right, and God's will, whatever else is not.

Now just conceive--I am sure that you easily may--what a blessing to
this parish, or this part of the country, it would be, were the
duties of godfathers really carried out and practised. Every child,
beside his father and mother, would have some two or three elder
friends at least, whom he had known from his childhood, whom he
could trust, to whom he could go in trouble as to his own flesh and
blood. The orphan would have, if not relations, still godparents,
to comfort and protect him. No one could go abroad without meeting,
if not a godparent, yet the godparent or godchild of a friend or a
relation; someone, in short, who had an interest in him, and he in
them. All would be bound together in threefold cords of interest
and affection. How many spites, family quarrels, mistakes, and
ignorances about each other would be done away, if people would but
thus simply enter into that communion of saints to which, by right,
they belong, and bear each other's burdens, and so fulfil the law of
Christ.--Unless you think that men are such ill-conditioned
creatures that the less they mix with each other the better. I do
not. I believe that the more we mix with each other, and the better
we know each other, the more we shall feel for each other: that the
more we help people, the more we shall find that they are worth
helping; that the more, in a word, we try to live, not after the