se friendship is one of the greatest blessings of your life. You
see in him a man perhaps much older than yourself, perhaps nearly your
coeval, but however a leader, who is also, in the Lord Jesus Christ,
your brother, and your most considerate while stimulating friend. He
consults you, without forgetting his responsibility of ultimate
direction. He gladly and fully recognizes and honours your work done
under his organization. He has not the slightest wish to come between
you and the affections of his parishioners among whom you move. He
cultivates, in his busy life, Christian fellowship with you in private;
you pray together, and talk together, not only about the parish but
about the Lord, and the Word, and your own souls. He lets you find in
him, as he is glad to find in you, just a man, a friend, a Christian,
with trials and blessings of inner experience on which it is sometimes
good to speak to one another; a living soul, companionable and human,
while in it Christ dwells by faith. You have experienced with happy
uniformity your Incumbent's patience, sympathy, fairness,
trustworthiness. You have seen in him one who is himself always at work,
always watching for the flock; who does not put on you this duty or that
merely because it is irksome to himself, but whose whole purposes are in
the cause of God, and who distributes labour in any and every interest
but his own.

And perhaps you see this man honoured and loved by all around you, as
they too see and know him to be what he is. You move about in the
parish, and you are quite sure to hear allusions to the Vicar. And as a
rule, perhaps, they are all friendly, all loyal, all grateful. You find
yourself, in short, under no appreciable present temptation, being (as
of course you are) a true man yourself, to do anything but identify
yourself very gladly with him.

YET EVEN HE IS NOT PERFECT.

But then, even in this bright supposed case--a case of which the Church
of England contains hundreds of practical examples, thank
God--appreciable temptations in the other direction, the wrong, unhappy,
fatal direction, may very conceivably creep upon you with time. Your
admirable Incumbent is all the while a mortal man, and as such, most
certainly (he himself above all men knows and owns it), he is not
perfect, not quite equal to himself in every way. Perhaps he has come to
be not perfect in physical health, and thus he is obliged, to his own
grief, to do less in this or that b