The thought that a minister of the gospel can be gluttonous is so painful that, after selecting as the caption to the present chapter, "A gluttonous minister," I concluded to modify it. Perhaps, after all, it might be as well in the end, to call things by their proper names. However, we will proceed, as we have set out, for this once.
A minister about forty years of age came to me one day, deeply involved in all the midnight horrors of dyspepsia.
On investigating his case, I found it one of the most trying I had ever met with. It was not only trying in itself, in the particular form and shape it assumed, but it had been rendered much more troublesome and unmanageable by injudicious medical treatment.
My course was a plain one, and I proceeded cautiously to prescribe for him—not medicine, for in my judgment he needed none, but simply a return to the physical laws he had so long and so palpably violated. These laws I endeavored briefly to recall to his attention. As he was an intelligent man, I dealt with him in the most plain and direct manner.
Some two or three weeks afterward he called on me again, saying that he was no better. I repeated my prescription, only more particularly. Still I was not, as I now think, sufficiently particular and definite, for want of time. Moreover, he still clung to the off-hand customs of empiricism,—that of looking at the tongue, feeling the pulse, and seeming "wondrous wise,"—and vainly hoped I would treat him in the same direct way, instead of requiring what he regarded as a more circuitous course.
He called on me the third time. We had now ample leisure and opportunity for attempting to ferret out the causes which had operated to bring him into his present condition, some of which, it appeared, had been of long standing.
I inquired, in the first place, concerning his exercise. This, he said, was taken very irregularly, chiefly in walking abroad on business, seldom or never in company. His mind, in all probability, was not directed, to any considerable extent, from its accustomed mill-horse track. His gait, too, when he walked, was staid and measured. It was never buoyant, lively, or playful. And as for amusement, he had none at all.
His diet was still worse than his exercise. He had a large family, and resided in the midst of a dense population; and was so situated as to render his house, practically, a kind of ministerial thoroughfare. He probably entertained, at his hospitable table, more ministers, literary men, and students than any other three clergymen in the neighborhood.
"Now," said he to me, "we have a good deal of table preparation to make, and Mrs. Y., who dearly loves to have things in pretty good order, sets a full table, with, a large variety. Well, this food must be eaten. It will never do for a minister who has a large family and lives on a moderate salary, to waste any thing. And, besides, as I ought to tell you, we sometimes, if not always, have a very considerable amount of rich food on the table."
"Do you mean to intimate that the bountiful provision you make for others renders it necessary for you to overeat? Or have your remarks a reference to a supposed necessity of eating rich food?"