Yet you will be sensible of various evils in the city clergyman’s life.  One is the great evil of over-work.  You are always on the stretch.  You never feel that your work is overtaken.  The time never comes, in which you feel that you may sit down and rest:  never comes, at least, save in the autumnal holiday.  It is expedient that a city clergyman should have his mind well stored before going to his charge:  for there he will find a perpetual drain upon his mind, and very little time for refilling it by general reading.  To prepare two sermons a week, or even one sermon a week, for an educated congregation (or indeed for any congregation), implies no small sustained effort.  It is not so very hard to write one sermon in one week; but is very hard to write thirty sermons in thirty successive weeks.  You know how five miles in five hours are nothing:  but a thousand miles in a thousand hours are killing.  But every one knows that the preparation for the pulpit is the least part of a town clergyman’s work.  You have many sick to visit regularly:  many frail and old people who cannot come to church.  You have schools, classes, missions.  And there is the constant effort to maintain some acquaintance with the families that attend your church, so that you and they shall not be strangers.  I am persuaded that there ought to be at least two clergymen to every extensive parish.  For it is not expedient that the clergy should have their minds and bodies ever on the strain, just to get througr the needful work of the day.  There is no opportunity, then, for the accumulation of some stock and store of thought and learning.  And one important service which the clergy of a country ought to render it, is the maintenance of learning, and general culture.  Indeed, a man not fairly versed in literature and science is not capable of preaching as is needful at the present day.  And when always overdriven, a man is tempted to lower his standard:  and instead of trying to do his work to the very best of his ability, to wish just to get decently through it.  Then, as for other men, they have the great happiness of knowing when their work is done.  When a lawyer has attended to his cases, he has no more to do that day.  So when the doctor has visited his patients.  But to clerical work there is no limit.  Your work is to do all the good you can.  There is the parish:  there is the population:  and the uneasy conscience is always suggesting thia and that new scheme of benevolent exertion.  The only limit to the clergyman’s duty is his strength:  and very often that limit is outrun.  Oh that one could wisely fix what one may safely and rightly do; and then resolutely determine not to attempt any more!  But who can do that?  If your heart be in your work, you are every now and then knocking yourself up.  And you cannot help it.  You advise your friends prudently against overwork; and then you go and work till you drop.