the penny, and our own souls are the pound. This
whole world is the hundred, while heaven itself is the shire. And the
question this evening is, Are we wise in the penny and foolish in the
pound? And, are we getting in the hundred and losing in the shire?

1. Well, then, to begin at the beginning, we are already begun to be
penny-wise and pound-foolish with our children when we are so particular
with them about their saying their little prayers night and morning,
while all the time we are so inattentive and so indolent to explain to
them how they are to pray, what they are to pray for, and how they are to
wait and how long they are to wait for the things they pray for. Then,
again, we are penny-wise and pound-foolish with our children when we
train them up into all the proprieties and etiquettes of family and
social life, and at the same time pay so little attention to their inward
life of opening thought and quickening desire and awakening passion. When
we are so eager also for our children to be great with great people,
without much regard to the moral and religious character of those great
people, then again we are like a man who may be wise for a penny, but is
certainly a fool for a pound. When we prefer the gay and the fashionable
world to the intellectual, the religious, and the philanthropical world
for our children, then we lose both the penny and the pound as well.
Almost as much as we do when we accept the penny of wealth and station
and so-called connection for a son or a daughter, in room of the pound of
character, and intelligence, and personal religion.

Then, again, even in our own religious life we are ourselves often and
notoriously wise in the penny and foolish in the pound. As, for
instance, when we are so scrupulous and so conscientious about forms and
ceremonies, about times and places, and so on. In short, the whole
ritual that has risen up around spiritual religion in all our churches,
from that of the Pope himself out to that of George Fox--it is all the
penny rather than the pound. This rite and that ceremony; this habit and
that tradition; this ancient and long-established usage, as well as that
new departure and that threatened innovation;--it is all, at its best,
always the penny and never the pound. Satan busied me about the lesser
matters of religion, says James Fraser of Brea, and made me neglect the
more substantial points. He made me tithe to God my mint, and my anise
and my