"Whether regarded in relation to your bodily strength, your spiritual interests, or to prudence in affairs, I should be disposed to advise you to decline, with a due sense of kindness, &c., the Bishop's offer. Your constitution is not a strong one, and it is highly desirable in that view alone that you should for a time officiate in a small sphere, and if it may be in a place where, as from your vicinity to Oxford, you can have assistance when you are not equal yourself to the whole duty. With such a scattered population, there must be a call I conceive for great bodily strength. Secondly, the situation appears to me still less eligible considered on higher grounds. It is no ground of blame to you that your studies have not hitherto been of divinity. Supply all that I should say under that head, were I not writing to one who is capable himself of suggesting it to his own mind. Again, you cannot have that acquaintance with human nature, either in general, or in your own self, which it would be desirable for any one to possess who was to be placed in so wide and populous a field, especially in one so circumstanced as this particular place. Then you would be at a distance from almost all your friends, which I mention now in reference to the spiritual disadvantages of the situation, not in relation to your comfort and Emily's, in which, however, it may be fairly admitted to some weight. Again, _I_ should much regret your being placed where you would naturally be called to study controversial anti-Roman Catholic divinity, rather than that which expects the cultivation of personal holiness in yourself and your parishioners. I could say much on this head. Thirdly, Mr. Neale sees the objections on the ground of pecuniary interest, as alone of so much weight, as to warrant your refusing the offer--a vicarage. Its income is commonly derived from small payments, and in that district probably of poor people whom you would not, could not squeeze, and yet without squeezing from whom you probably would get nothing. Most likely a curate would be indispensable." On the same topic Wilberforce writes again:-- "_March 17th, 1829._