e walk, not the rumour of the
walk, is what concerns righteousness. Better disrespectable honour than
dishonourable fame. Better useless or seemingly hurtful honour, than
dishonour ruling empires and filling the mouths of thousands. For the
man must walk by what he sees, and leave the issue with God who made him
and taught him by the fortune of his life. You would not dishonour
yourself for money; which is at least tangible; would you do it, then,
for a doubtful forecast in politics, or another person's theory in
morals?

So intricate is the scheme of our affairs, that no man can calculate the
bearing of his own behaviour even on those immediately around him, how
much less upon the world at large or on succeeding generations! To walk
by external prudence and the rule of consequences would require, not a
man, but God. All that we know to guide us in this changing labyrinth is
our soul with its fixed design of righteousness, and a few old precepts
which commend themselves to that. The precepts are vague when we
endeavour to apply them; consequences are more entangled than a wisp of
string, and their confusion is unrestingly in change; we must hold to
what we know and walk by it. We must walk by faith, indeed, and not by
knowledge.

You do not love another because he is wealthy or wise or eminently
respectable: you love him because you love him; that is love, and any
other only a derision and grimace. It should be the same with all our
actions. If we were to conceive a perfect man, it should be one who was
never torn between conflicting impulses, but who, on the absolute
consent of all his parts and faculties, submitted in every action of his
life to a self-dictation as absolute and unreasoned as that which bids
him love one woman and be true to her till death. But we should not
conceive him as sagacious, ascetical, playing off his appetites against
each other, turning the wing of public respectable immorality instead
of riding it directly down, or advancing toward his end through a
thousand sinister compromises and considerations. The one man might be
wily, might be adroit, might be wise, might be respectable, might be
gloriously useful; it is the other man who would be good.

The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be successful;
to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially, not outwardly,
respectable. Does your soul ask profit? Does it ask money? Does it ask
the approval of the indifferent herd? I b