incomprehensible and unimaginable goodness toward me of all sinners far and away the most unworthy.  The voices and the concert of voices of angels and men be to Thee; the concert of all thy saints in heaven and of all Thy creatures in heaven and on earth; and of me, beneath their feet an unworthy and wretched sinner, Thy abject creature; my praise also, now, in this day and hour, and every day till my last breath, and till the end of this world, and then to all eternity, where they cease not saying, To Him who loved us, Amen!

CHAPTER XIII—­MR. PENNY-WISE-AND-POUND-FOOLISH, AND MR. GET-I’-THE-HUNDRED-AND-LOSE-I’-THE-SHIRE

   ’For, what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world,
   and lose his own soul?’—­Our Lord.

This whole world is the penny, and our own souls are the pound.  This whole world is the hundred, while heaven itself is the shire.  And the question this evening is, Are we wise in the penny and foolish in the pound?  And, are we getting in the hundred and losing in the shire?

1.  Well, then, to begin at the beginning, we are already begun to be penny-wise and pound-foolish with our children when we are so particular with them about their saying their little prayers night and morning, while all the time we are so inattentive and so indolent to explain to them how they are to pray, what they are to pray for, and how they are to wait and how long they are to wait for the things they pray for.  Then, again, we are penny-wise and pound-foolish with our children when we train them up into all the proprieties and etiquettes of family and social life, and at the same time pay so little attention to their inward life of opening thought and quickening desire and awakening passion.  When we are so eager also for our children to be great with great people, without much regard to the moral and religious character of those great people, then again we are like a man who may be wise for a penny, but is certainly a fool for a pound.  When we prefer the gay and the fashionable world to the intellectual, the religious, and the philanthropical world for our children, then we lose both the penny and the pound as well.  Almost as much as we do when we accept the penny of wealth and station and so-called connection for a son or a daughter, in room of the pound of character, and intelligence, and personal religion.

Then, again, even in our own religious life we are ourselves often and notoriously wise in the penny and foolish in the pound.  As, for instance, when we are so scrupulous and so conscientious about forms and ceremonies, about times and places, and so on.  In short, the whole ritual that has risen up around spiritual religion in all our churches, from that of the Pope himself out to that of George Fox—­it is all the penny rather than the pound.  This rite and that ceremony; this habit and that tradition; this ancient and long-established