ng. Perhaps he has somewhat lost command over
temper; perhaps he has not yet found in our Lord's great fulness the
open secret by which He supplies patience to His servants, even when
they are sorely vexed by man. And just possibly difficulty between
Curate and Vicar threatens to arise from some side-quarter; from those
who stand around the Vicar, who inevitably see him often and intimately,
who are active and important under-workers in his field, and who may
themselves be not quite fully "governed by the Spirit and Word of God."

BEWARE OF THE GROWTH OF A CURATE'S PARTY.

I have put a good many supposed cases. How much I should rejoice if I
could know that not one reader of this page could find any of my
"peradventures" the least in point within his experience. But I must
emphasize one of them which is hardly a peradventure at all; namely that
the Curate is practically certain, sooner or later, to find temptations
presented to his loyalty by the conversation of parishioners. There is
not one parish in all England where everybody is pleased with the
Incumbent; pleased always and about everything. And if the given Vicar
or Rector employs a Curate, and if that Curate is you, it will be a
moral miracle if you never hear of such discontents. You will hear of
them, very probably, in ways which will offer you, however faintly, an
opportunity of acting towards your chief a little as Absalom acted
towards David when he expressed certain pious wishes that _he_ were made
judge in the land in his father's place. [2 Sam. xv. 1-6.] I do not for
a moment mean that you are, or ever will be, a man of treacherous
_purposes_; the Lord forbid. But if you do not watch, and are not in
some measure forewarned, you may easily be betrayed unawares, quite
unawares, into speech or into action which will practically be
treacherous to the man who is over you in Christ, and so toward Christ's
work and cause in the parish where you serve. Do you not know the
possibilities to which I refer? Have they not crossed either your own
path or that of some Curate-friend of yours? Is there no such thing as
an intimacy formed by the Curate in some house where the Incumbent is
not liked, and is that intimacy never used by the Curate _not_ for the
noblest ends? Is there no weak listening to parochial gossip on the
Curate's part? Is there never any allowance by the younger man of a
growth around him, in ways which he could stop summarily, if he tried,
of a certa