although he be wrong, so also is the dead, stuffed Dagon he insults.  For the voice of God, whatever it is, is not that stammering, inept tradition which the people holds.  These truths survive in travesty, swamped in a world of spiritual darkness and confusion; and what a few comprehend and faithfully hold, the many, in their dead jargon, repeat, degrade, and misinterpret.

So far of Respectability; what the Covenanters used to call ‘rank conformity’: the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid on men.  And now of Profit.  And this doctrine is perhaps the more redoubtable, because it harms all sorts of men; not only the heroic and self-reliant, but the obedient, cowlike squadrons.  A man, by this doctrine, looks to consequences at the second, or third, or fiftieth turn.  He chooses his end, and for that, with wily turns and through a great sea of tedium, steers this mortal bark.  There may be political wisdom in such a view; but I am persuaded there can spring no great moral zeal.  To look thus obliquely upon life is the very recipe for moral slumber.  Our intention and endeavour should be directed, not on some vague end of money or applause, which shall come to us by a ricochet in a month or a year, or twenty years, but on the act itself; not on the approval of others, but on the rightness of that act.  At every instant, at every step in life, the point has to be decided, our soul has to be saved, heaven has to be gained or lost.  At every step our spirits must applaud, at every step we must set down the foot and sound the trumpet.  ‘This have I done,’ we must say; ‘right or wrong, this have I done, in unfeigned honour of intention, as to myself and God.’  The profit of every act should be this, that it was right for us to do it.  Any other profit than that, if it involved a kingdom or the woman I love, ought, if I were God’s upright soldier, to leave me untempted.