not escape this universal and fatal law. Weak, evil, and self-seeking
men are near us, and we lean upon them, look to them, and listen to them.
We make them our strength and support, and seek repose and refreshment
from them. They cannot be all or any of these things to us; but we are
far on in life, we are done with life, before we have discovered that and
will admit that. Most men never discover and admit that till they are
out of this life altogether. Christ's praise and the applause of His
saints and angels are so future and so far away from us, and man's praise
and the applause of this world, hollow and false as it is, is so near us,
that we feed our souls on offal and garbage, when, already, in the
witness of a good conscience, we might be feasting our souls on the
finest of the wheat, and satisfying them with honey out of the rock. And,
then, this insatiable appetite of our hearts, being so degraded and
perverted, like all degraded and perverted appetites, becomes an iron-
fast slave to what it feeds upon. What miserable slaves we all are to
the approval and the praise of men! How they hold us in their bondage!
How we lick their hands and sit up on our haunches and go through our
postures for a crumb! How we crawl on our belly and lick their feet for
a stroke and a smile! What a hound's life does that man lead who lives
upon the approval and the praise and the patronage of men! What meanness
fills his mind; what baseness fills his heart! What a shameful leash he
is led about the world in! How kicked about and spat upon he is; while
not half so much as he knows all the time that he deserves to be! Better
far be a dog at once and bay the moon than be a man and fawn upon the
praises of men.

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,