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.