Yet the ministry is the best place in the world to learn that poverty is a nut that yields good meat if you crack it boldly. Well I remember an icy rectory which had but one register in the Arctic regions of the second story. At bedtime we would gather about this register to warm our toes. Each blanketed to the ears like a little Indian, we would discourse as serenely and acutely as any schoolmen, of the nature of angels, for was not the whole realm of heaven and earth ours for the mere talking? Pinched and patched we might be, but bold to meet penury with a consciousness of princely possessions. I did not so much think well of myself for this superiority to worldly comforts as I thought scorn of those who did not have it. Very early I had a contempt for a child who could not evolve a game from a clothespin or set a pageant moving forth from a box of buttons. I had a veritable snobbishness of disdain for a youngster who had to be amused.
Necessarily one requires respect for inward resources when the only things one has ever had enough of are bread and butter and books. Every ministerial child breathes book-madness and burns for an education. When at the age of five you have known your father to go without boots for a book, and then to caper like a weanling lamb on the volume’s arrival, you have acquired something more potent than a mere conscientious respect for literature; rather you have learned to regard the book-world as a place of bacchanal liberty and delight forever open to you. I do not know whether it tended toward my humanizing or against it that the dominant beings of my young imagination were Books, while those of my girl friends were Boys.
There is nothing more effective than clerical penury to teach one the cheapness of dreams. The door of fantasy stands always open for the rectory household to enter, singly or together. I think every ministerial family cherishes that one dear dream of all unwilling gypsies. They always hope somehow, somewhere, sometime, to find a house that shall be a home. Do what you may, a rectory is always house, not home. It may always belong to some one else next month. If only it were worth while to plant perennials in our flower-beds! If only it were worth while to plant friendships to bear fruit in after years! Yet this last we can never help doing as we pass from parish to parish, being at heart most human of wanderers. It must be very beautiful to belong somewhere, to have, for instance, cousinships in the neighborhood. There are never any family parties in the ministry. There are never any gentle grandsires to come forth from their kindly crypts and give guarantee of our characters to the community. On each new camping-ground we stand, a huddled family group, completely dependent on our own efforts for introduction.
These new-parish sensations tempt to generalizations, for they are so alike, in town after town. The zest of a new call wears away even in one’s infancy. Perhaps the captain still expects to find his tents pitched in Arcady, but not so his family; we meet the Parish’s reception acutely on our good behavior, exquisitely affable to all, but our inner motto is, “Watch out!” It is usually those parishioners who give us most effusive welcome who will be readiest to desire our godspeed. It is those who stand back and look us over who will be our firmest friends. We cannot resent their attitude because it is exactly our own. We, too, are looking them over.
When we go into a new parish the first person we meet is some one who isn’t there, namely, our predecessor, that thorn in the flesh of the most righteous saint and soldier. There is always a predecessor, and however dead or distant, he is always there, in the hearts of the Parish, and quite frequently he is in their homes as well. However callous, however courteous one may endeavor to be, one cannot escape a slight sensation of stiffening when parishioners want The Other One to marry or bury them. Think of the well-bred wrangle that sometimes occurs in settling the clerical rights to a corpse! In all my ministerial experience I never knew a predecessor and a successor who loved each other. Yet I speak without bitterness, for one of the proudest and pleasantest sensations of our ministry has been that of being a predecessor ourself.
To an unwilling nomad there is nothing so monotonous as change, yet the very constancy of our march engenders an amazing ease of adjustment to each new environment. In our relations to people, we clericals learn an adaptability almost pathetically perfect. We succeed in being all things to all men by never being all ourselves to any man. Our affability is the armor that protects the inner sensitive personality. Perhaps we are naturally expansive, but we early learn the perils of frankness, so that it comes about that along our pilgrimage we are friendly, but have few friends, those few, however, the tenderest, trustiest friends in the world, those few, rare spirits of a keenness and a kindness to penetrate the steel-strong armor of ministerial reserve. Very young, we clerical sons and daughters learn to pass from millionaire to laundress with no change of manner. The reason is not far to seek; we own senior warden and washerwoman as our parishioners, equally, because warden and washerwoman, equally, feel that they own us. With equal freedom the two censure or serve, love or hate, us. Recognizing the proprietory rights of each, we realize that each may be equally our bane or our blessing. Yet our democracy goes deeper than all this. Half-hearted soldiers we may often be, but we never doubt the sincerity of our flag. We had the luck to be born into the household of the consecrated, whether we wanted to be or not; we are genuinely democratic for the same reason that the apostles were.
Perhaps there is another reason, and a wickeder one, why all men stand in our sight naked of all accidental social trappings; and that is that we know them all so well! I cannot determine how clearly the world may see into rectory windows, but certainly one sees pretty clearly from rectory windows. It is a heart-searching and heart-revealing relation, that of a parish to its parson. The completely voluntary nature of all church effort and church organization affords an exhibition of idiosyncrasies not to be found in any other association. When I think of the crimes and the crankiness sometimes committed in the name of religion, I thank Heaven that the effect of these in a ministerial household is more often amusement than cynicism. I was grown up before I realized that the ostensible purpose of a choir is to praise the Lord: in my youth I always thought of a choir solely as a means of perfecting a rector in patience.
But always there exists the other side in the parochial relation, the side not of badness, but of beauty. Personally I perceive no stronger argument against the charge of present-day irreligion than the tribute of trust paid to any sincere minister. From my childhood on I have seen it everywhere, the respect for consecration. Everywhere I have heard it, the belief in the man who believes, ring confident as the cry of the roadside beggar upon the Nazarene.
Few people think it worth while to put on pretense with a clergyman; they rarely try to make him think them better than they are; yet he generally does think so. It is frequently the alertness to protect the captain against his own unworldliness that teaches his family their sanity and sureness of insight. This very insight may, however, make them poorer-spirited than their superior officer, craven and fain to capitulate. In a parish skirmish they are likely to be divided between hot loyalty to his cause and a vain hope that he won’t think it necessary to fight. I can picture the probable domestic anxiety in the house of Calchas when in pursuit of his calling he found it necessary to stand up to the king of men, Agamemnon!
Long campaigning is likely to make ministerial offspring lovers of peace, yet I believe I am not really unwilling to fight the Devil. The trouble is that we of the ministry so often fight him when he isn’t there. I wish our young theologues could be taught the sound and shape of Satan. Frankly I arraign the theological seminary as a very poor military school. It sends forth a soldier who does not know so much as how to set up a tent, whose idea of the Enemy is a mediæval bugaboo in a book. I would establish two new chairs in our seminaries, a chair of agriculture, rudimentary, perhaps, but sufficient to teach the difference between tares and wheat, which Nature, uninstructed in any isms, still ordains shall grow together unto the harvest; and a second chair, in common sense, to dispense instruction in human nature. The average theologue is deep-read in Hebrew Scripture, but ignorant of the A B C of the tongue in which is written the Bible of man’s soul. Doctors may dispute the divine inspiration of the former, but who of us is infidel enough to dispute the divine inspiration of the latter? Perhaps the more reprehensible fault of the seminary is not so much deficiency in the matter of its teaching as deficiency in its maturity. No thinking person wishes to receive his spiritual guidance from an unthinking boy. I am constantly puzzled by the ill-logic of our ministerial preparation when I reflect that the foundation of its teaching is the fact that God Himself thought it necessary to be thirty years a man with men before He was ready to teach or to preach.