is no trial of conscience or of courage
in confessing that you belong to it. But as Shame so ably and honestly
said, that type of religion that creates a tender conscience in its
followers, and sets them to watch their words and their ways, and makes
them tie themselves up from all hectoring liberty--to choose that
religion, and to cleave to it to the end, will make a young man the
ridicule still of all the brave spirits round about him. Ambitious young
men get promotion and reward every day among us for desertions and
apostasies in religion, for which, if they had been guilty of the like in
war, they would have been shot. 'And so you are a Free Churchman, I am
told.' That was all that was said. But the sharp youth understood
without any more words, and he made his choice accordingly; till it is
becoming a positive surprise to find the rising members of certain
professions in certain churches. The Quakers have a proverb in England
that a family carriage never drives for two generations past the parish
church door. Of which state of matters Shame showed himself a shrewd
prophet two hundred years ago when he said that but few of the rich and
the mighty and the wise remained long of Faithful's Puritan opinion
unless they were first persuaded to be fools, and to be of a voluntary
fondness to venture the loss of all.

And I will tell you two other things, said sharp-sighted and plain-spoken
Shame, that your present religion will compel you to do if you adhere to
it. It will compel you from time to time to ask your neighbour's
forgiveness even for petty faults, and it will insist with you that you
make restitution when you have done the weak and the friendless any hurt
or any wrong. And every manly mind will tell you that life is not worth
having on such humbling terms as those are. Whatever may be thought
about Shame in other respects, it cannot be denied that he had a sharp
eye for the facts of life, and a shrewd tongue in setting those facts
forth. He has hit the blot exactly in the matter of our first duty to
our neighbour; he has put his finger on one of the matters where so many
of us, through a false shame, come short. It costs us a tremendous
struggle with our pride to go to our neighbour and to ask his forgiveness
for a fault, petty fault or other. Did you ever do it? When did you do
it last, to whom, and for what? One Sabbath morning, now many years ago,
I had occasion to urge this elementary evangelic