are more enslaved by them than multitudes who follow them only afar off.
These reverence the judgments of society in things of far greater
importance than the colour or cut of a gown; often without knowing it, they
judge life, and truth itself, by the falsest of all measures, namely, the
judgment of others falser than themselves; they do not ask what is true or
right, but what folk think and say about this or that. James, for instance,
altogether missed being a gentleman by his habit of asking himself how, in
such or such circumstances, a gentleman would behave. As the man of honour
he would fain know himself, he would never tell a lie or break a promise;
but he had not come to perceive that there are other things as binding as
the promise which alone he regarded as obligatory. He did not, for
instance, mind raising expectations which he had not the least intention of
fulfilling.

Being a Scotch lad, it is not to be wondered at that he should turn to
Theology as a means of livelihood; neither is it surprising that he should
do so without any conscious love to God, seeing it is not in Scotland alone
that untrue men take refuge in the Church, and turn the highest of
professions into the meanest, laziest, poorest, and most unworthy, by
following it without any genuine call to the same. In any profession, the
man must be a poor common creature who follows it without some real
interest in it; but he who without a spark of enthusiasm for it turns to
the Church, is either a "blind mouth," as Milton calls him--scornfullest of
epithets, or an "old wife" ambitious of telling her fables well; and
James's ambition was of the same contemptible sort--that, namely, of
distinguishing himself in the pulpit. This, if he had the natural gift of
eloquence, he might well do by its misuse to his own glory; or if he had it
not, he might acquire a spurious facility resembling it, and so be every
way a mere windbag.