endeavour should be directed, not on some vague end of money or
applause, which shall come to us by a ricochet in a month or a year, or
twenty years, but on the act itself; not on the approval of others, but
on the rightness of that act. At every instant, at every step in life,
the point has to be decided, our soul has to be saved, heaven has to be
gained or lost. At every step our spirits must applaud, at every step we
must set down the foot and sound the trumpet. "This have I done," we
must say; "right or wrong, this have I done, in unfeigned honour of
intention, as to myself and God." The profit of every act should be
this, that it was right for us to do it. Any other profit than that, if
it involved a kingdom or the woman I love, ought, if I were God's
upright soldier, to leave me untempted.

It is the mark of what we call a righteous decision, that it is made
directly and for its own sake. The whole man, mind and body, having come
to an agreement, tyrannically dictates conduct. There are two
dispositions eternally opposed: that in which we recognise that one
thing is wrong and another right, and that in which, not seeing any
clear distinction, we fall back on the consideration of consequences.
The truth is, by the scope of our present teaching, nothing is thought
very wrong and nothing very right, except a few actions which have the
disadvantage of being disrespectable when found out; the more serious
part of men inclining to think all things _rather wrong_, the more
jovial to suppose them _right enough for practical purposes_. I will
engage my head, they do not find that view in their own hearts; they
have taken it up in a dark despair; they are but troubled sleepers
talking in their sleep. The soul, or my soul at least, thinks very
distinctly upon many points of right and wrong, and often differs flatly
with what is held out as the thought of corporate humanity in the code
of society or the code of law. Am I to suppose myself a monster? I have
only to read books, the Christian Gospels for example, to think myself a
monster no longer; and instead I think the mass of people are merely
speaking in their sleep.

It is a commonplace, enshrined, if I mistake not, even in school
copy-books, that honour is to be sought and not fame. I ask no other
admission; we are to seek honour, upright walking with our own
conscience every hour of the day, and not fame, the consequence, the
far-off reverberation of our footsteps. Th