The Recreations of a Country ParsonBoyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
General
The Recreations of a Country Parson
Boyd, Andrew Kennedy Hutchison
Clergy -- Anecdotes; Country life -- England; Rural clergy -- England
human beings, all more or less of screws mentally and morally, need
all kinds of management, on the part of our friends and on our own
part, or we should go all wrong. There is something truly fearful
when we find that clearest-headed and soberest-hearted of men,
the great Bishop Butler, telling us that all his life long he was
struggling with horrible morbid suggestions, devilish is what he
calls them, which, but for being constantly held in check with the
sternest effort of his nature, would have driven him mad. Oh, let
the uncertain, unsound, unfathomable human heart be wisely and
tenderly driven! And as there are things which with the unsound
horse you dare not venture on at all, so with the fallen mind. You
who know your own horse, know that you dare not trot him hard down
hill. And you who know your own mind and heart, know that there are
some things of which you dare not think; thoughts on which your
only safety is resolutely to turn your back. The management needful
here is the management of utter avoidance. How often we find poor
creatures who have passed through years of anxiety and misery,
and experienced savage and deliberate cruelty which it is best to
forget, lashing themselves up to wrath and bitterness by brooding
over these things, on which wisdom would bid them try to close
their eyes for ever!
But not merely do screws daily draw cabs and stage-coaches: screws
have won the Derby and the St. Leger. A noble-looking thorough-bred
has galloped by the winning-post at Epsom at the rate of forty
miles an hour, with a white bandage tightly tied round one of
its fore-legs: and thus publicly confessing its unsoundness, and
testifying to its trainer's fears, it has beaten a score of steeds
which were not screws, and borne off from them the blue ribbon of
the turf. Yes, my reader: not only will skilful management succeed
in making unsound animals do decently the hum-drum and prosaic
task-work of the equine world; it will succeed occasionally in
making unsound animals do in magnificent style the grandest things
that horses ever do at all. Don't you see the analogy I mean to
trace? Even so, not merely do Mr. Carlyle's seventeen millions of
fools get somehow through the petty wrork of our modern life, but
minds which no man could warrant sound and free from vice, turn off
some of the noblest work that ever was done by mortal. Many of the
grandest things ever done by human minds, have been done by minds
that were incurable screws. Think of the magnificent service done
to humankind by James Watt. It is positively impossible to calculate
what we all owe to the man that gave us iho steam-engine. It is
sober truth that the inscription in Westminster Abbey tells, when
it speaks of him as among the 'best benefactors' of the race. Yet
what an unsound organization that great man had! Mentally, what a
screw! Through most of his life, he suffered the deepest misery
from desperate depression of spirits; he was always fancying that
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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