dfather'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
likeness of the beasts, selfish and apart, but after the order and
constitution of God's Church, to which we belong, and which is, that
we are all fellow-members of one body, then the more we shall find
that God's order is the right, good, blessed order, by obeying which
we enter into comfort of which we never dream as long as we lead
selfish, separate, worldly lives; as it is written, 'Eye hath not
seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to
conceive, the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.'

This may seem a fanciful dream, too fair to be possible; but what
prevents it from being possible, save and except our own selfishness
and laziness?

And as for what fruit will spring from it, I have seen, by
experience, the blessing of godfathership and godmothership, where
it is really carried out; how it will knit together, in sacred bonds
of friendship, not mere