PART XI.
TRADES AND PROFESSIONS.
LETTER I.
TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN OF ABILITY AND CULTURE WHO HAD NOT DECIDED ABOUT HIS PROFESSION.
The Church—Felicities and advantages of the clerical profession—Its elevated ideal—That it is favorable to noble studies—French priests and English Clergymen—The professional point of view—Difficulty of disinterested thinking—Colored light—Want of strict accuracy—Quotation from a sermon—The drawback to the clerical life—Provisional nature of intellectual conclusions—The legal profession—That it affords gratification to the intellectual powers—Want of intellectual disinterestedness in lawyers—Their absorption in professional life—Anecdote of a London lawyer—Superiority of lawyers in their sense of affairs—Medicine—The study of it a fine preparation for the intellectual life—Social rise of medical men coincident with the mental progress of communities—Their probable future influence on education—The heroic side of their profession—The military and naval professions—Bad effect of the privation of solitude—Interruption—Anecdote of Cuvier—The fine arts—In what way they are favorable to thought—Intellectual leisure of artists—Reasoning artists—Sciences included in the fine arts.
It may be taken for granted that to a mind constituted as yours is, no profession will be satisfactory which does not afford free play to the intellectual powers. You might no doubt exercise resolution enough to bind yourself down to uncongenial work for a term of years, but it would be with the intention of retiring as soon as you had realized a competency. The happiest life is that which constantly exercises and educates what is best in us.
You had thoughts, at one time, of the Church, and the Church would have suited you in many respects very happily, yet not, I think, in all respects. The clerical profession has many great felicities and advantages: it educates and develops, by its mild but regular discipline, much of our higher nature; it sets before us an elevated ideal, worth striving for at the cost of every sacrifice but one, of which I intend to say something farther on; and it offers just that mixture of public and private life which best affords the alternation of activity and rest. It is an existence in many respects most favorable to the noblest studies. It offers the happiest combination of duties that satisfy the conscience with leisure for the cultivation of the mind; it gives the easiest access to all classes of society, providing for the parson himself a neutral and independent position, so safe that he need only conduct himself properly to preserve it. How superior, from the intellectual point of view, is this liberal existence to the narrower one of a French curé de campagne! I certainly think that if a good curé has an exceptional genius for sanctity, his chances of becoming a perfect saint are better than those of a comfortable English incumbent, who is at the same time a gentleman and man of the world, but he is not nearly so well situated for leading the intellectual life. Our own clergy have a sort of middle position between the curé and the layman, which without at all interfering with their spiritual vocation, makes them better judges of the character of laymen and more completely in sympathy with it.