Therefore we must have some persons to bear witness of that, to remind the child himself, and the whole Church, that he is not merely a soul by itself to be saved, but that he is a brother, a member of a family; that he is bound to that family henceforth, for good and for evil.  And this the godfathers and godmothers do:  they represent and stand in the place of the whole Church.  In one sense, every Christian who meets that child through life, or hears of it, ought to behave, as far as he can, as its godfather; ought to help and improve it if he can.  But what is everybody’s business, says the proverb, is nobody’s business; and therefore these godfathers and godmothers are called out from the rest, as examples to the rest, to watch over the child, and to help and advise its father and mother in guiding and training it:  but not by interfering with a parent’s rights, God forbid! or by drawing away the child’s affections from its own flesh and blood; for if a child be not taught first to honour its father and mother, there is little use in teaching it anything else whatsoever; and a godfather’s first duty is to see that his godchild obeys its earthly parents for the Lord’s sake, for that is right, and God’s will, whatever else is not.

Now just conceive—­I am sure that you easily may—­what a blessing to this parish, or this part of the country, it would be, were the duties of godfathers really carried out and practised.  Every child, beside his father and mother, would have some two or three elder friends at least, whom he had known from his childhood, whom he could trust, to whom he could go in trouble as to his own flesh and blood.  The orphan would have, if not relations, still godparents, to comfort and protect him.  No one could go abroad without meeting, if not a godparent, yet the godparent or godchild of a friend or a relation; someone, in short, who had an interest in him, and he in them.  All would be bound together in threefold cords of interest and affection.  How many spites, family quarrels, mistakes, and ignorances about each other would be done away, if people would but thus simply enter into that communion of saints to which, by right, they belong, and bear each other’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.—­Unless you think that men are such ill-conditioned creatures that the less they mix with each other the better.  I do not.  I believe that the more we mix with each other, and the better we know each other, the more we shall feel for each other:  that the more we help people, the more we shall find that they are worth helping; that the more, in a word, we try to live, not after the likeness of the beasts, selfish and apart, but after the order and constitution of God’s Church, to which we belong, and which is, that we are all fellow-members of one body, then the more we shall find that God’s order is the right, good, blessed order, by obeying which we enter into comfort of which we never dream as long as we lead selfish, separate, worldly lives; as it is written, ’Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive, the things which God has prepared for those who love Him.’