^[ The mischief which arises from habitual anxiety about the good opinion of men is more than can be told. It is speaking strongly, but truly, to say that it makes the whole of our life unchristian; that it dethrones our Maker from His lawful authority, and sets up an idol in His place; that it makes us heathens as completely, for all purposes of our souls' danger, as if we were to bow down and offer sacrifice to a graven image.2
Tf Take the case of the famous Francis Bacon. Bacon's greatness on its intellectual side it is almost impossible to exaggerate. It was his proud, and by no means empty, boast that he had taken all knowledge to be his province. Such a vision of truth, such power to comprehend and to speak it, have rarely been granted to any man. In sheer intellectual might he stands, in our nation at least, with the one exception of Shakespeare, without a peer. And yet, notwithstanding all his magnificent gifts, we see him stooping to almost incredible meanness and perfidy, suffering himself to become the abject tool of a wretch like Buckingham, a mere " chessman," as he himself put it, in the hand of a monarch so weak and contemptibles a James 1. What is the explanation ? Why this strange mingling of mud and marble, of meanness and magnificence? Let Dean Church, who of all Bacon's critics has, perhaps, understood him best, answer : " There was," he says, " in Bacon's ' self ' a deep and fatal flaw. He was a pleaser of men. There was in him that subtle fault, noted and named, both by religion and philosophy,
1 J. H. F. Peile, The Reproach of the Gospel,, 194. a T. Arnold.
150 OUR THREE JUDGES
in the apea/cos of Aristotle, the dvOpcoTrdpeo-fcos of St. Paul, which is more common than it is pleasant to think even in good people, but which, if it becomes dominant in a character, is ruinous to truth and power." In all history is there any warning so tragic of the shipwreck that men suffer when they trim their sails to catch the favour of the many or the great ? *
^[ It is clear from Bishop Wilkinson's recorded words that no man was ever more intensely sensitive to the least breath of opposition or hostility; he instinctively desired and valued the good opinion of the world. But he valued his conscience and his message more, and never modified the truths he had to tell; while his very sensitiveness kept him from ever presuming or dictating, and gave him an instinct for conciliation which was never blunted.2
K Let not thy peace depend on the tongues of men, for whether they judge well of thee or ill, thou art not on that account other than thyself.3
ii. Our Friends.
1. The man seen by the persons who know him best may be quite a different man from the man the world sees ; for every man has two sides — one to face the world with, and one to show to the friend of his heart.
^[ I once had a friend. The popular opinion about him was that he was very quiet and rather dull, without ideas, or experience, or character of his own. Such was the man the world saw. But the man I saw was quite a different being — a man of the most genial humour, who could break into conversation the most lively and discursive or the most serious and profound, with a mind richly stored with unusual knowledge, a fertile imagination, and a moral nature which had passed through all the great experiences of the human soul and all the peculiar experience of our new time.4
Ah, but that's the world's side, there's the wonder, Thus they see you, praise you, think they know you. There, in turn, I stand with them and praise you, But the best is when I glide from out them, Cross a step or two of dubious twilight, Come out on the other side, the novel Silent silver lights and darks undreamed of, Where I hush and bless myself with silence.
1 G. Jackson. 2 A. C. Benson, The Leaves of the Tree, 119.
8 Thomas a- Kempis. * J. Stalker.
i CORINTHIANS iv. 3, 4 151
2. But if the too severe judgments of others are hard for us to bear, their too favourable judgments are far more perilous to us. We are so apt to assume that all the pleasant things said about us are true, to be satisfied with approbation which we know to be nothing but superficial. We each, no doubt, if we choose, know our own weaknesses and our own sins; perhaps they are unknown to every one else, perhaps they are known only to some few of our friends. Yet if we seem to be accepted by those who do not know them, with favourable judgment and trusting affec- tion— perhaps respected and loved for our external pleasantness, treated as we know we should not be treated if they knew our real inner selves — is it not a dangerous temptation to us to accept the affection and the approbation as our true merit, and to forget the weakness or the sin that is not known ?
Greatly his foes he dreads, but more his friends; He hurts me most who lavishly commends.1