“All of them are pressing,” replied the minister.  “I am dunned every day.”

“Indeed!  That’s bad!” returned Mr. Elder, speaking with more real kindness and sympathy than at first.  “I am sorry you have been permitted to get into so unpleasant a situation.”

“It certainly is very unpleasant, and entirely destroys my peace.  Were I not thus unhappily situated, I should not have said a word to you on the subject of my salary.”

“Don’t let it distress you so much, Mr. Malcolm.  I will see that the amount you need is at once made up.”

The minister returned home, disturbed, mortified, and humiliated.

“If this is the way they pay their minister,” he remarked to his wife, after relating to her what had happened, “it is the last year that I shall enjoy the benefits of their peculiar system.  But little good will my preaching or that of any one else do them, while they disregard the first and plainest principles of honesty.  There is no lack of ability to give a minister the support he needs; and the withholding of that support, or the supplying of it by constraint, shows a moral obtuseness that argues but poorly for their love of any thing but themselves.  I believe that the labourer is worthy of his hire; that when men build a church and call a minister for their own spiritual good, they are bound to supply his natural wants; and that, if they fail to do so, it is a sign to the minister that he ought to leave them.  Some may call this a selfish doctrine, and unworthy of a minister of God; but I believe it to be the true doctrine, and shall act up to it.  It does men no good to let them quietly go on, year after year, starving their ministers, while they have abundant means to make them comfortable.  If they prize their wealth higher than they do spiritual riches, it is but casting pearls before swine to scatter even the most brilliant gems of wisdom before them; and in this unprofitable task I am the last man to engage.  I gave up all hope of worldly good, in order to preach the everlasting gospel for the salvation of men.  In order to do this successfully, my mind must be kept free from the depressing cares of life, and there must be something reciprocal in those to whom I minister in heavenly things.  If this be not the case, all my labour will be in vain.”

On the next day, as the minister was walking down the street, he met Mr. Larkin.  The allusion to this gentleman’s personal matters, which the vestryman had made, still caused him to feel sore; it touched him in a vulnerable part.  He had been talking quite freely, since then, to every member of the church he happened to meet about the coolness with which Mr. Malcolm, after running himself in debt, a thing he had no business to do, called upon the church to raise him more money.  He for one he said, was not going to stand any such nonsense, and he hoped every member of the church would as firmly set his face against all such impositions.  If they were to pay off this debt, they would have another twice as large to settle in a few months.  It was the principle of the thing he went against; not that he cared about a few dollars.  As soon as Mr. Larkin saw the minister a little ahead of him, he determined to give him a piece of his mind.  So when they paused, face to face, and while their hands were locked in a friendly clasp, he said—­