False glory often verges towards vanity; but it often leads to excesses, while vainglory is more confined to splendid littlenesses. A prince who should look for honor in revenge, would seek a false glory rather than a vain one.
To give glory signifies to acknowledge, to bear witness. Give glory to truth, means acknowledging truth—Give glory to the God whom you serve—Bear witness to the God whom you serve.
Glory is taken for heaven—He dwells in glory; but this is the case in no religion but ours. It is not allowable to say that Bacchus or Hercules was received into glory, when speaking of their apotheosis. The saints and angels have sometimes been called the glorious, as dwelling in the abode of glory.
Gloriously is always taken in the good sense; he reigned gloriously; he extricated himself gloriously from great danger or embarrassment.
To glory in, is sometimes taken in the good, sometimes in the bad, sense, according to the nature of the object in question. He glories in a disgrace which is the fruit of his talents and the effect of envy. We say of the martyrs, that they glorified God—that is, that their constancy made the God whom they attested revered by men.
SECTION II.
That Cicero should love glory, after having stifled Catiline's conspiracy, may be pardoned him. That the king of Prussia, Frederick the Great, should have the same feelings after Rosbach and Lissa, and after being the legislator, the historian, the poet, and the philosopher of his country—that he should be passionately fond of glory, and at the same time, have self-command enough to be modestly so—he will, on that account, be the more glorified.
That the empress Catherine II. should have been forced by the brutish insolence of a Turkish sultan to display all her genius; that from the far north she should have sent four squadrons which spread terror in the Dardanelles and in Asia Minor; and that, in 1770, she took four provinces from those Turks who made Europe tremble—with this sort of glory she will not be reproached, but will be admired for speaking of her successes with that air of indifference and superiority which shows that they were merited.
In short, glory befits geniuses of this sort, though belonging to the very mean race of mortals.
But if, at the extremity of the west, a townsman of a place called Paris thinks he has glory in being harangued by a teacher of the university, who says to him: "Monseigneur, the glory you have acquired in the exercise of your office, your illustrious labors with which the universe resounds," etc., then I ask if there are mouths enough in that universe to celebrate, with their hisses, the glory of our citizen, and the eloquence of the pedant who attends to bray out this harangue at monseigneur's hotel? We are such fools that we have made God glorious like ourselves.