pretend to give; but why should we be honoured?

I hope some day you and Mrs. Gosse will come for a Sunday; but we
must wait till I am able to see people. I am very full of Jenkin's
life; it is painful, yet very pleasant, to dig into the past of a
dead friend, and find him, at every spadeful, shine brighter. I
own, as I read, I wonder more and more why he should have taken me
to be a friend. He had many and obvious faults upon the face of
him; the heart was pure gold. I feel it little pain to have lost
him, for it is a loss in which I cannot believe; I take it, against
reason, for an absence; if not to-day, then to-morrow, I still
fancy I shall see him in the door; and then, now when I know him
better, how glad a meeting! Yes, if I could believe in the
immortality business, the world would indeed be too good to be
true; but we were put here to do what service we can, for honour
and not for hire: the sods cover us, and the worm that never dies,
the conscience, sleeps well at last; these are the wages, besides
what we receive so lavishly day by day; and they are enough for a
man who knows his own frailty and sees all things in the proportion
of reality. The soul of piety was killed long ago by that idea of
reward. Nor is happiness, whether eternal or temporal, the reward
that mankind seeks. Happinesses are but his wayside campings; his
soul is in the journey; he was born for the struggle, and only
tastes his life in effort and on the condition that he is opposed.
How, then, is such a creature, so fiery, so pugnacious, so made up
of discontent and aspiration, and such noble and uneasy passions -
how can he be rewarded but by rest? I would not say it aloud; for
man's cherished belief is that he loves that happiness which he
continually spurns and passes by; and this belief in some ulterior
happiness exactly fits him. He does not require to stop and taste