‘With me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you,’ enlightened Christians that you are, or by the outside world.  Now, Paul’s letters give ample evidence that he was keenly alive to the hostile and malevolent criticisms and slanders of his untiring opponents.  Many a flash of sarcasm out of the cloud like a lightning bolt, many a burst of wounded affection like rain from summer skies, tell us this.  But I need not quote these.  Such a character as his could not but be quick to feel the surrounding atmosphere, whether it was of love or of suspicion.  So, he had to harden himself against what naturally had a great effect upon him, the estimate which he felt that people round him were making of him.  There was nothing brusque, rough, contemptuous in his brushing aside these popular judgments.  He gave them all due weight, and yet he felt, ’From all that this lowest tribunal may decide, there are two appeals, one to my own conscience, and one to my Master in heaven.’

Now, I suppose I need not say a word about the power which that terrible court which is always sitting, and which passes judgment upon every one of us, though we do not always hear the sentences read, has upon us all.  There is a power which it is meant to have.  It is not good for a man to stand constantly in the attitude of defying whatever anybody else chooses to say or to think about him.  But the danger to which we are all exposed, far more than that other extreme, is of deferring too completely and slavishly to, and being far too subtly influenced in all that we do by, the thought of what A, B, or C, may have to say or to think about it.  ’The last infirmity of noble minds,’ says Milton about the love of fame.  It is an infirmity to love it, and long for it, and live by it.  It is a weakening of humanity, even where men are spurred to great efforts by the thought of the reverberation of these in the ear of the world, and of the honour and glory that may come therefrom.

But not only in these higher forms of seeking after reputation, but in lower forms, this trembling before, and seeking to conciliate, the tribunal of what we call ‘general opinion,’ which means the voices of the half-dozen people that are beside us and know about us, besets us all, and weakens us all in a thousand ways.  How many men would lose all the motive that they have for living reputable lives, if nobody knew anything about it?  How many of you, when you go to London, and are strangers, frequent places that you would not be seen in in Manchester?  How many of us are hindered, in courses which we know that we ought to pursue, because we are afraid of this or that man or woman, and of what they may look or speak?  There is a regard to man’s judgment, which is separated by the very thinnest partition from hypocrisy.  There is a very shadowy distinction between the man who, consciously or unconsciously, does a thing with an eye to what people may say about it, and the man who pretends to be what he is not for the sake of the reputation that he may thereby win.