country parish, have come most heartily to enjoy its peaceful life:  have grown fond of that, as they never thought to do.  I do not mean that you need affectedly talk, after a few months there, as if you had lived in the country all your life, and as if your thoughts had from childhood run upon horses, turnips, and corn.  But in sober earnest, as weeks pass over, you gain a great interest in little country cares; and you discover that you may be abundantly useful, and abundantly laborious, amid a small and simple population.

Yet sometimes, my clever friend, I know you sit down on a green bank, under the trees, and look at your little church.  You think, of your companions and competitors in College days, filling distinguished places in life:  and, more particularly, of this and that friend in your own calling, who preaches to as many people on one Sunday as you do in half a year.  Fine fellows they were:  and though you seldom meet now, you are sure they are faithful, laborious, able, and devoted ministers:  God bless them all!  You wonder how they can do so much work; and especially how they have confidence to preach to so large and intelligent congregations.  For a certain timidity, and distrust of his own powers, grows upon the country parson.  He is reaching the juster estimate of himself, indeed:  yet there is something not desirable in the nervous dislike to preach in large churches and to cultivated people which is sure to come.  And little things worry him, which would not worry a mind kept more upon the stretch.  It is possible enough that among the Cumberland hills, or in curacies like Sydney Smith’s on Salisbury Plain, or wandering sadly by the shore of Shetland fiords, there may be men who had in them the makings of eminent preachers; but whose powers have never been called out, and are rusting sadly away:  and in whom many petty cares are developing a pettiness of nature.

I have observed that in those advertisements which occasionally appear in certain newspapers, offering for sale the next presentation to some living in the Church, the advertiser, after pointing out the various advantages of the situation, frequently sums up by stating that the population of the parish is very small, and so the clergyman’s duty very light.  I always read such a statement with great displeasure.  For it seems to imply, that a clergyman’s great object is, to enjoy his benefice and do as little duty as possible in return for it.  I suppose it need not be proved, that if such were truly the great object of any parson, he has no business to be in the Church at all.  Failing health, or powers overdriven, may sometimes make even the parson whose heart is in his work desire a charge whose duty and responsibility are comparatively small:  but I firmly believe that in the case of the great majority of clergymen, it is the interest and delight they feel in their work, and not its worldly emolument, that mainly attach them to their sacred profession:  and thus that