misdirected, and not controlled by reason, the faculty which judges between
good and evil. Else why has God put His love of praise into the heart of
every child which is born into the world, and entwined it into the holiest
filial and family affections, as the earliest mainspring of good actions?
Has God appointed that every child shall be fed first with a necessary
lie, and afterwards come to the knowledge of your supposed truth, that the
praise of God alone is to be sought? Or are we to believe that the child is
intended to be taught as delicately and gradually as possible the painful
fact, that the praise of all men is not equally worth having, and to use
his critical faculty to discern the praise of good men from the praise
of bad, to seek the former and despise the latter? I should say that the
last was the more reasonable. And this I will say, that if you bring up
any child to care nothing for the praise of its parents, its elders, its
pastors, and masters, you may make a fanatic of it, or a shameless cynic:
but you will neither make it a man, an Englishman, or a Christian.

"But 'our Lord's words stand, about not seeking the honour which comes from
men, but the honour which comes from God only!' True, they do stand, and
our Lord's fact stands also, the fact that He has created every child to
be educated by an honour which comes from his parents and elders. Both are
true. Here, as in most spiritual things, you have an antinomia, an apparent
contradiction, which nothing but the Gospel solves. And it does solve it;
and your one-sided view of the text resolves itself into just the same
fallacy as the old ascetic one. 'We must love God alone, therefore we must
love no created thing.' To which St. John answers pertinently 'He who
loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath
not seen?' If you love your brethren, you love Christ in them. If you love
their praise, you love the praise of Christ in them. For consider this,
you cannot deny that, if one loves any person, one desires that person's
esteem. But we are bound to love all men, and that is our highest state.