The Recreations of A Country Parson | Page 2

I have spent such happy
days, and which I have come to love so much.
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 convinced
that, we have no right to complain of either: I do not mean merely the
labour to put things in the right point of view: but the moral effort to
look fairly at the facts not in any way disguised,--not tricked out by
some skilful art of putting things;--and yet to repress all wrong
feeling;--all fretfulness, envy, jealousy, dislike, hatred. I do not mean,
to persuade ourselves that the grapes are sour; but (far nobler surely) to
be well aware that they are sweet, and yet be content that another
should have them and not we. I mean the labour, when you have run in
a race and been beaten, to resign your mind to the fact that you have
been beaten, and to bear a kind feeling towards the man who beat you.
And this is labour, and hard labour; though very different from that
physical exertion which the uncivilized man would understand by the
word. Every one can understand that to carry a heavy portmanteau a
mile is work. Not every one remembers that the owner of the
portmanteau, as he walks on carrying nothing weightier than an
umbrella, may be going through exertion much harder than that of the
porter. Probably St. Paul never spent days of harder work in all his life,
than the days he spent lying blind