r the bee, I might be allowed
without question so to use the salary appointed to me as to make some
provision for the winter-day of life, or for the spring that would come
after, and might be to others bleak and cold and desolate without it. So
often have I witnessed this, that I am most heartily thankful that, on
leaving New York, I was not reduced to utter destitution, and that with
some moderate exertion I am able to provide for our modest wants. At
the same time I do not feel obliged to conceal the conviction, and never
did, that the service of religion in our churches meets with no just
remuneration. One may suffer martyrdom and not complain; but I do not
think one is bound to say that it is a reasonable or pleasant thing.
[104] Another thing I will be so frank as to say on leaving New York,
and that is, that it was a great moral relief to me to lay down the
burden of the parochial charge. I regretted to leave New York; I could
have wished to live and die among the friends I had there; I should make
it my plan now to spend my winters there, if I could afford it: but that
particular relation to society,--no man, it seems to me, can heartily
enter into it without feeling it to weigh heavily upon him. Sympathy
with affliction is the trial-point of the clergyman's office. In the
natural and ordinary relations of life every man has enough of it.
But to take into one's heart, more or less, the personal and domestic
sorrows of two or three hundred families, is a burden which no man who
has not borne it can conceive of. I sometimes doubt whether it was ever
meant that any man, or at least any profession of men, should bear it;
whether the general ministrations of the pulpit to affliction should not
suffice, leaving the application to the hearer in this case as in other
cases; whether the clergyman's relations to distress and suffering
should not be like every other man's,--general with his acquaintance,
intimate with his friends; whether, if there were nothing conventional
or customary about this matter, most families would not prefer to be
left to themselves, without a professional call from their minister.
Suppose that there were no rule with regard to it; that the clergyman,
like every [105] other man, went where his feelings carried him, or his
relations warranted; that it was no more expected of him, as a matter
of course, to call upon a bereaved family, than of any other of their
acquaintance,--would not that be a bett