I have said that the parson is for the most part saved the labour of determining where he shall pitch his tent:  his place and his path in life are marked out for him.  But he has his own special perplexity and labour:  quite different from those of the man to whom the hundred thousand pounds to invest in land are bequeathed:  still, as some perhaps would think, no less hard.  His work is to reconcile his mind to the place where God has set him.  Every mortal must, in many respects, face one of these two trials.  There is all the world before you, where to choose; and then the struggle to make a decided choice with which you shall on reflection remain entirely satisfied.  Or there is no choice at all:  the Hand above gives you your place and your work; and then there is the struggle heartily and cheerfully to acquiesce in the decree as to which you were not consulted.

And this is not always an easy thing; though I am sure that the man who honestly and Christianly tries to do it, will never fail to succeed at last.  How curiously people are set down in the Church; and indeed in all other callings whatsoever!  You find men in the last places they would have chosen; in the last places for which you would say they are suited.  You pass a pretty country church, with its parsonage hard-by embosomed in trees and bright with roses.  Perhaps the parson of that church had set his heart on an entirely different kind of charge:  perhaps he is a disappointed man, eager to get away, and (the very worst possible policy) trying for every vacancy of which he can hear.  You think, as you pass by, and sit down on the churchyard wall, how happy you could be in so quiet and sweet a spot:  well, if you are willing to do a thing, it is pleasant:  but if you are struggling with a chain you cannot break, it is miserable.  The pleasantest thing becomes painful, if it is felt as a restraint.  What can be cosier than the warm environment of sheet and blanket which encircles you in your snug bed?  Yet if you awake during the night at some alarm of peril, and by a sudden effort try at once to shake yourself clear of these trammels, you will, for the half-minute before you succeed, feel that soft restraint as irksome as iron fetters.  ’Let your will lead whither necessity would drive,’ said Locke, ’and you will always preserve your liberty.’  No doubt, it is wise advice; but how to do all that?

Well, it can be done:  but it costs an effort.  Great part of the work of the civilized and educated man consists of that which the savage, and even the uneducated man, would not regard as work at all.  The things which cost the greatest effort may be done, perhaps, as you sit in an easy chair with your eyes shut.  And such an effort is that of making up our mind to many things, both in our own lot, and in the lot of others.  I mean not merely the intellectual effort to look at the success of other men and our own failure in such a way as that we shall be intellectually