ways, and makes them tie themselves up from all hectoring liberty—­to choose that religion, and to cleave to it to the end, will make a young man the ridicule still of all the brave spirits round about him.  Ambitious young men get promotion and reward every day among us for desertions and apostasies in religion, for which, if they had been guilty of the like in war, they would have been shot.  ’And so you are a Free Churchman, I am told.’  That was all that was said.  But the sharp youth understood without any more words, and he made his choice accordingly; till it is becoming a positive surprise to find the rising members of certain professions in certain churches.  The Quakers have a proverb in England that a family carriage never drives for two generations past the parish church door.  Of which state of matters Shame showed himself a shrewd prophet two hundred years ago when he said that but few of the rich and the mighty and the wise remained long of Faithful’s Puritan opinion unless they were first persuaded to be fools, and to be of a voluntary fondness to venture the loss of all.

And I will tell you two other things, said sharp-sighted and plain-spoken Shame, that your present religion will compel you to do if you adhere to it.  It will compel you from time to time to ask your neighbour’s forgiveness even for petty faults, and it will insist with you that you make restitution when you have done the weak and the friendless any hurt or any wrong.  And every manly mind will tell you that life is not worth having on such humbling terms as those are.  Whatever may be thought about Shame in other respects, it cannot be denied that he had a sharp eye for the facts of life, and a shrewd tongue in setting those facts forth.  He has hit the blot exactly in the matter of our first duty to our neighbour; he has put his finger on one of the matters where so many of us, through a false shame, come short.  It costs us a tremendous struggle with our pride to go to our neighbour and to ask his forgiveness for a fault, petty fault or other.  Did you ever do it?  When did you do it last, to whom, and for what?  One Sabbath morning, now many years ago, I had occasion to urge this elementary evangelical duty on my people here, and I did it as plainly as I could.  Next day one of my young men, who is now a devoted and honoured elder, came to me and told me that he had done that morning what his conscience yesterday told him in the church to do.  He had gone to a neighbour’s place of business, had asked for an interview, and had begged his neighbour’s pardon.  I am sure neither of those two men have forgotten that moment, and the thought of it has often since nerved me to speak plainly about some of their most unwelcome duties to my people.  Shame, no doubt, pulled back my noble friend’s hand when it was on the office bell, but, like Faithful in the text, he shook him out of his company and went in.  I spoke of the remarkable justice of the newspaper