But in these days I think we have more especially to remember that the Beautiful Gate of all noble living rests, like the gate of the Jewish Temple, on two pillars, both of which show signs of being considerably out of repair.  One of these pillars is obedience, or discipline.  If you have not exacted prompt and unhesitating obedience in your boy, from his earliest childhood, to the parents whom he has seen, do you think that in after years he will obey the Father of Lights, whom he has not seen?  Do you think, if you have let him set your authority at defiance, he will in future years, with temptation on one side and opportunity on the other, bow to the invisible authority of conscience?  What is it, I ask, that makes the army the finest school for character, giving us our Lawrences, our Havelocks, our Gordons, our Kitcheners, but simply this habit of implicit obedience, of that discipline which has grown so grievously lax in so many of our English homes?  In Carlyle’s strong words, “Obedience is our universal duty and destiny, wherein whoso will not bend must break:  too early and too thoroughly we cannot be trained to know that ‘would,’ in this world of ours, is as mere zero to ‘should,’ and for most part as the smallest of fractions even to ‘shall.’"[10]

The second great pillar of the portal of noble life seems to me to show still greater signs of being out of repair and in want of restoration, and that pillar is reverence,—­that heaven-eyed quality which Dr. Martineau rightly places at the very top of the ethical scale.  Let that crumble, and the character which might have been a temple sinks into a mere counting-house.  When in these days children are allowed to call their father Dick, Jack, or Tom, and nickname their own mother; when they are allowed to drown the voice of the most honored guest at the table with their little bald chatter, so that even the cross-questioning genius of a Socrates would find itself at a discount; when they are allowed to criticise and contradict their elders in a way that would have appalled our grandmothers; when they are suffered to make remarks which are anything but reverent on sacred things—­have I not some reason to fear that the one attribute which touches the character to fine issues is threatened with extinction?  Do you think that the boy who has never been taught to reverence his own mother’s womanhood will reverence the degraded womanhood of our streets, or hear that Divine Voice guarding all suffering manhood and all helpless womanhood from wrong at his hands, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me?”