t simply this
habit of implicit obedience, of that discipline which has grown so
grievously lax in so many of our English homes? In Carlyle's strong
words, "Obedience is our universal duty and destiny, wherein whoso will
not bend must break: too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained
to know that 'would,' in this world of ours, is as mere zero to
'should,' and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to
'shall.'"[10]

The second great pillar of the portal of noble life seems to me to show
still greater signs of being out of repair and in want of restoration,
and that pillar is reverence,--that heaven-eyed quality which Dr.
Martineau rightly places at the very top of the ethical scale. Let that
crumble, and the character which might have been a temple sinks into a
mere counting-house. When in these days children are allowed to call
their father Dick, Jack, or Tom, and nickname their own mother; when
they are allowed to drown the voice of the most honored guest at the
table with their little bald chatter, so that even the cross-questioning
genius of a Socrates would find itself at a discount; when they are
allowed to criticise and contradict their elders in a way that would
have appalled our grandmothers; when they are suffered to make remarks
which are anything but reverent on sacred things--have I not some reason
to fear that the one attribute which touches the character to fine
issues is threatened with extinction? Do you think that the boy who has
never been taught to reverence his own mother's womanhood will reverence
the degraded womanhood of our streets, or hear that Divine Voice
guarding all suffering manhood and all helpless womanhood from wrong at
his hands, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have
done it unto Me?"

Oh, I would entreat you to set yourself firmly against this evil
tendency of our day, to which I cannot but believe so much of its
agnosticism is due,--that deadening down and stamping out of the
spiritual instincts of our nature, those great intuitions of the soul,
which lie both above and below all reasoning and logic and form their
basis rather than their apex. Once let the springs of reverence be
choked up, once let that window of the soul be overgrown with weeds and
cobwebs, and your most careful training will only produce a character
estimable in many respects, but for the most part without noble
aspirations, without high ideals, with no great enthusiasms--