but thou shalt call thy walls Salvation, and thy gates Praise.  And such also is all true praise between man and man.  How deliciously sweet is praise!  How we labour after it! how we look for it and wait for it! and how we languish and die if we do not get it!  Again, when it comes to us, how it cheers us up and makes our face to shine!  For a long time after it our step is so swift on the street and our face beams so that all men can quite well see what has come to us.  Praise is like wine in our blood; it is new life to our fainting heart.  So much is this the case that a salutation of praise is to be our first taste of heaven itself.  It will wipe all tears off our eyes when we hear our Lord saying to us, “Well done!” when all our good works that we have done in the body shall be found unto praise and honour and glory in the great day of Jesus Christ.

At the same time, this same love of praise is one of our most besetting and fatal temptations as long as we are in this false and double and deceptive world.  Sin, God curse it! has corrupted and poisoned everything, the very best things of this life, and when the best things are corrupted and poisoned they become the worst things.  And praise does 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.