There are men, too, who will neglect their households and leave their children unprovided for, and even uneducated, while they are spending their money on philanthropic or religious hobbies of their own.  It is ill to take the children’s bread and cast it to the dogs; or even to the angels.  It is ill, I say, trying to make God presents, before we have tried to pay God our debts.  The first duty of every man is to the wife whom he has married, and to the children whom she has brought into the world; and to neglect them is not heroism, but self-conceit; the conceit that a man is so necessary to Almighty God, that God will actually allow him to do wrong, if He can only thereby secure the man’s invaluable services.  Be sure that every motive which comes not from the single eye; every motive which springs from self; is by its very essence unheroic, let it look as gaudy or as beneficent as it may.

But I cannot go so far as to say the same of the love of approbation—­the desire for the love and respect of our fellow-men.

That must not be excluded from the list of heroic motives.  I know that it is, or may be proved to be, by victorious analysis, an emotion common to us and the lower animals.  And yet no man excludes it less than that true hero, St. Paul.  If those brave Spartans, if those brave Germans, of whom I spoke just now, knew that their memories would be wept over and worshipped by brave men and fair women, and that their names would become watchwords to children in their fatherland:  what is that to us, save that it should make us rejoice, if we be truly human, that they had that thought with them in their last moments to make self-devotion more easy, and death more sweet?

And yet—­and yet—­is not the highest heroism that which is free even from the approbation of our fellow-men, even from the approbation of the best and wisest?  The heroism which is known only to our Father who seeth in secret?  The Godlike deeds alone in the lonely chamber?  The Godlike lives lived in obscurity?—­a heroism rare among us men, who live perforce in the glare and noise of the outer world:  more common among women; women of whom the world never hears; who, if the world discovered them, would only draw the veil more closely over their faces and their hearts, and entreat to be left alone with God.  True, they cannot always hide.  They must not always hide; or their fellow-creatures would lose the golden lesson.  But, nevertheless, it is of the essence of the perfect and womanly heroism, in which, as in all spiritual forces, woman transcends the man, that it would hide if it could.