Do you desire that your son should begin his ministerial life under a man of great ability, sound sense, courage, and religious earnestness, a man who never spares himself and will not suffer his subordinates to sink into slovenly frivolity and idleness, then make your approaches to Lucullus, and you will have cause to thank God if the young fellow serves his apprenticeship under a guide and teacher such as this. He will learn no nonsense there, and see no masquerading, only an undemonstrative but unflinching adherence to the path believed to be the path of duty, and a manliness of self-surrender such as can only arouse an enthusiasm of respect and esteem.
Does “our own correspondent” wish to see how a score of infamous hovels can be changed into a score of model cottages which pay interest on the cost of their erection, and which in half a dozen years have helped perceptibly to raise the tone and tastes and habits of the population till it really looks as if some barbarians could be civilized by a coup de main?—let him pay a visit to the parish of our Reverend Hercules, only one of whose many labours it has been to cleanse an Augean stable. It will do him good to see the mighty shoulders of that rugged philanthropist, him of the broad brow and the great heart and the deep purse, always at work and always at home, about the very last man in England to be suspected of belonging to the sickly sort of puling visionaries.
Do you want to meet with a type of the saintly parish priest, one after holy George Herbert’s heart, one with hardly a thought that does not turn upon the service of the sanctuary or the duties that he owes to his scattered flock? Come with me, and we will go together and look at one of the most beautiful village churches in the land, on which our devout Ambrose has spent his thousands only with deep gratitude that he has been permitted to spend them so—and with never a word of brag or publicity, never a paragraph foisted into the newspapers. And as we pass out of that quiet churchyard, trim as a queen’s parterre, I will show you the window of that little study which Ambrose has not thought it right to enlarge, and if he be not there, be sure we shall find him at his school or by the sick-bed of the poor, or inquiring into some case of sorrow or sin where a kindly hand or a wise word may peradventure solace the sad or go some way to raise the fallen.
What country parson among all the nine hundred and odd within this unwieldy diocese has lived a simpler or more devoted life than our Nestor—[Greek: γέρων ἱππηλάτα Νέστωρ]—he who for more than threescore years and ten has gone in and out among his people, and doing his pastoral work so naturally, so much as a matter of course, that no one thinks of his being a rich man, except when those towering horses of his stop at our lowly portals and have to be corkscrewed into our diminutive stables?
And who knows not of thee, Euerges, treasurer and secretary and general mainstay of every good work, the idol of thy people and their healer, the terror of the impostor, and the true friend of all that deserve thy helping hand and purse! or thee, too, Amomos, who after thirty years of work as an evangelist in the city, spending there thyself and thy substance all the while, hast now betaken thee to the poor villagers, if haply some little good may yet be done among the lowly ones before the night cometh when no man can work?
“But do not such well-meaning gentlemen as these demoralize the poor?” Oh dear yes! of course they do. It is so very demoralizing to help a lame dog over a stile. It does so pauperize a broken-down couple to whom the Poor Law Guardians allow three shillings a week and half a stone of flour, if you give them a sack of potatoes about Christmas time. It corrupts and degrades Biddy Bundle to bestow an old petticoat upon her when she is shivering with the cold, and it takes all self-respect and independence from the unruly bosom of Dick the fiddler to offer him your old hat or a shabby pair of trousers. The truest, wisest, most far-sighted and most magnanimous charity is to let Harry Dobbs have “an order for the house” when he is out of work and short of coals—Harry Dobbs, who set himself against all the laws of political economy, and married at eighteen, when he had not the wherewithal to buy the chairs and tables. So we country parsons are a demoralizing force in the body politic forsooth, because we cannot bear to see poor people starve at our gates. We have been known actually to give soup to a reckless couple guilty of twelve children; actually soup! And we have dropped corrupting shillings into trembling hands, only because they were trembling, and distributed ounces of tobacco to the inmates of the Union, and poisoned the souls of old beldames with gratuitous half-pounds of tea. And we counsel people to come to church, when they would much rather go to the public-house, and we coddle them and warm them now and then, and instead of leaving them to learn manliness and independence and self-reliance on twelve shillings a week, we step between them and the consequences of their own improvidence, and we disturb the action of the beautiful laws of the universe, and where we see the ponderous wheels of Juggernaut just going to roll over a helpless imbecile who has tripped and dropped, we must needs make a clutch at him and pull him out by the scruff of the neck, and tell him to get up and not do it again. And all this is demoralizing and pauperizing, is it?
Out upon you! you miserable prigs with your chatter and babble! You to talk of the parson’s narrowness and his bigotry and his cant? You to sneer at him for being the slave of a superstition? You to pose as the only thinkers with all the logic of all the philosophers on your side, all the logic and never a crumb of common sense to back it? Bigotry and intolerance and cant and class jealousy and scorn—that refuge for the intellectually destitute and the blustering coward—where will you find them in all their most bitter and sour and hateful intensity, if not among the new lights, the self-styled economists? And we have to sit mum and let brainless pretenders superciliously put us out of court with a self-complacent wave of the hand, as they give utterance to perky platitudes about the clergy pauperizing the working man. No, Mr. Dandy Dryskull. No! this gospel of yours, a little trying to listen to, is being found out; ours will see the end of it.
You preach Sir Andrew and his love of law,
And we the Saviour and His law of love!
I, for one, hereby proclaim and declare that I intend to help the sick and aged and struggling poor whenever I have the chance, and as far as I have the means, and I hope the day will never come when I shall cease to think without shame of him who is said to have made it his boast that he had never given a beggar a penny in his life. I am free to confess that I draw the line somewhere. I do draw the line at the tramp—I do find it necessary to be uncompromising there. Indeed I keep a big dog for the tramp, and that dog, inasmuch as he passes his happy life in a country parsonage—that dog, I say, is not muzzled.
“But don’t you get imposed upon? Don’t you get asked to replace dead horses and cows and pigs and donkeys, that never walked on four legs and no mortal eye ever saw in the land of the living?”