If you would be a man at all, not to speak of a Christian man, starve this appetite till you have quite extirpated it.  You will never be safe from it as long as it stirs within you.  Extirpate it!  Extirpate it!  You will never know true self-respect and you will never deserve to know it, till you have wholly extirpated your appetite for praise.  Put your foot upon it, put it out of your heart.  Stop fishing for it, and when you see it coming, turn away and stop your ears against it.  And should it still insinuate itself, at any rate do not repeat to others what has already so flattered and humbled and weakened you.  Telling it to others will only humble and weaken you more.  By repeating the praise that you have heard or read about yourself you only expose yourself and purchase well-deserved contempt for yourself.  And, more than that, by fishing for praise you lay yourself open to all sorts of flatterers.  Honest men, men who truly respect and admire you, will show you their dignified regard and appreciation of you and your work by their silence; while your leaky slaves will crowd around you with floods of praise that they know well will please and purchase you.  And when you cannot with all your arts squeeze a drop out of those who love and honour you, gallons will be poured upon you by those who have respect neither for themselves nor for you.  Faugh!  Flee from flatterers, and take up only with sternly true and faithful men.  “I am much less regardful,” says Richard Baxter, “of the approbation of men, and set much lighter store by their praise and their blame, than I once did.  All worldly things appear most vain and unsatisfying to those who have tried them most.  But while I feel that this has had some hand in my distaste for man’s praise, yet it is the increasing impression on my heart of man’s nothingness and God’s transcendent greatness; it is the brevity and vanity of all earthly things, taken along with the nearness of eternity;—­it is all this that has at last lifted me above the blame and the praise of men.”

To conclude; let us make up our mind and determine to pass on to God on the spot every syllable of praise that ever comes to our eyes or our ears—­if, in this cold, selfish, envious, and grudging world, any syllable of praise ever should come to us.  Even if pure and generous and well-deserved praise should at any time come to us, all that does not make it ours.  The best earned usury is not the steward’s own money to do with it what he likes.  The principal and the interest, and the trader too, are all his master’s.  And, more than that, after the wisest and the best trader has done his best, he will remain, to himself at least, a most unprofitable servant.  Pass on then immediately, dutifully, and to its very last syllable, to God all the praise that comes to you.  Wash your hands of it and say, Not unto us, O God, not unto us, but unto Thy name.  And then, to take the most selfish and hungry-hearted view of this whole matter, what you thus pass on to God as not your own but His, He will soon, and in a better and safer world, return again to the full with usury to you, and you again to God, and He again to you, and so on, all down the pure and true and sweet and blessed life of heaven.