ecclesiastical rubric;
some absolutely indifferent form in public worship; some small
casuistical question about a creed or a catechism; some too nice point of
confessional interpretation; the mint and anise and cummin of such
matters will fill and inflame and poison a man's mind and heart and
conscience for months and for years, to the total destruction of all that
for which churches and creeds exist; to the total suspense, if not the
total and lasting destruction, of sobriety of mind, balance and breadth
of judgment, humility, charity, and a hidden and a holy life. The penny
of a perverted, partial, and fanaticised conscience has swallowed up the
pound of instruction, and truth, and justice, and brotherly love.

2. 'Nor is the man with the long name at all inferior to the other,'
said Lucifer, in laying his infernal plot against the peace and
prosperity of Mansoul. Now, the man with the long name was just Mr. Get-
i'-the-hundred-and-lose-i'-the-shire. A hundred in the old county
geography of England was a political subdivision of a shire, in which
five score freemen lived with their freeborn families. A county or a
shire was described and enumerated by the poll-sheriff of that day as
containing so many enfranchised hundreds; and the total number of
hundreds made up the political unity of the shire. To this day we still
hear from time to time of the 'Chiltern Hundreds,' which is a division of
Buckinghamshire that belongs, along with its political franchise, to the
Crown, and which is utilised for Crown purposes at certain political
emergencies. This proverb, then, to get i' the hundred and lose i' the
shire, is now quite plain to us. You might canvass so as to get a
hundred, several hundreds, many hundreds on your side, and yet you might
lose when it came to counting up the whole shire. You might possess
yourself of a hundred or two and yet be poor compared with him who
possessed the whole shire. And then the proverb has been preserved out
of the old political life of England, and has been moralised and
spiritualised to us in the _Holy War_. And thus after to-night we shall
always call this shrewd proverb to mind when we are tempted to take a
part at the risk of the whole; to receive this world at the loss of the
next world; or, as our Lord has it, to gain the whole world and to lose
our own soul. Lot's choice of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Esau's purchase of
the mess of pottage in the Old Testament; and then Ju