Some ministers are such ardent students of the Bible and of men, they are after a twenty-five years’ residence in a parish so full of things that ought to be said, that their resignation would be a calamity.  Others get through in three months and ought to go; but it takes an earthquake to get them away.  They must be moved on by committees, and pelted with resolutions, stuck through with the needles of the ladies’ sewing society, and advised by neighboring ministers, and hauled up before presbyteries and consociations; and after they have killed the church and killed themselves, the pastoral relation is dissolved.

We knew of a man who got a unanimous call.  He wore the finest pair of gaiters that ever went into that pulpit; and when he took up the Psalm book to give out the song, it was the perfection of gracefulness.  His tongue was dipped in “balm of a thousand flowers,” and it was like the roll of one of Beethoven’s symphonies to hear him read the hardest Bible names, Jechonias, Zerubbabel and Tiglath-pileser.  It was worth all the salary paid him to see the way he lifted his pocket-handkerchief to his eyelids.

But that brother, without knowing it, got through in six weeks.  He had sold out his entire stock of goods, and ought to have shut up shop.  Congregations enjoy flowers and well-folded pocket-handkerchiefs for occasional desserts, but do not like them for a regular meal.  The most urbane elder was sent to the minister to intimate that the Lord was probably calling him to some other field, but the elder was baffled by the graciousness of his pastor, and unable to discharge his mission, and after he had for an hour hemmed and hawed, backed out.

Next, a woman with a very sharp tongue was sent to talk to the minister’s wife.  The war-cloud thickened, the pickets were driven in, and then a skirmish, and after a while all the batteries were opened, and each side said that the other side lied, and the minister dropped his pocket-handkerchief and showed his claws as long as those of Nebuchadnezzar after he had been three years eating grass like an ox.  We admire long pastorates when it is agreeable to both parties, we know ministers who boast they have been thirty years in one place, though all the world knows they have been there twenty-nine years too long.  Their congregations are patiently waiting their removal to a higher latitude.  Meanwhile, those churches are like a man with chronic rheumatism, very quiet—­not because they admire rheumatism, but because there is no use kicking with a swollen foot, since it would hurt them more than the object assaulted.

If a pastorate can be maintained only through conflict or ecclesiastical tyranny, it might better be abandoned.  There are many ministers who go away from their settlements before they ought, but we think there are quite as many who do not go soon enough.  A husband might just as well try to keep his wife by choking her to death with a marriage ring as a minister to try to keep a church’s love by ecclesiastical violence.  Study the best time to quit.