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
'The grand source of worry,' says our author, 'compared with which
perhaps all others are trivial, lies in the complexity of human
affairs, especially in such an era of civilization as our own.'
There can be no doubt of it. In these modern days, we are encumbered
and weighed down with the appliances, physical and moral, which
have come to be regarded as essential to the carry lag forward of
our life. We forget how many thousands of separate items and articles
were counted up, as having been used, some time within the last
few years, by a dinner-party of eighteen persons, at a single
entertainment. What incalculable worry in the procuring, the keeping
in order, the using, the damage, the storing up, of that enormous
complication of china, glass, silver, and steel! We can well imagine
how a man of simple tastes arid quiet disposition, worried even
to death by his large house, his numerous servants and horses, his
quantities of furniture and domestic appliances, all of a perishable
nature, and all constantly wearing out and going wrong in various
degrees, might sigh a wearied sigh for the simplicity of a hermit's
cave and a hermit's fare, and for 'one perennial suit of leather.'
Such a man as the Duke of Buccleuch, possessing enormous estates,
oppressed by a deep feeling of responsibility, and struggling to
maintain a personal supervision of all his intricate and multitudinous
belongings, must day by day undergo an amount of worry which the
philosopher would probably regard as poorly compensated by a dukedom
and three hundred thousand a year. He would be a noble benefactor
of the human race who should teach men how to combine the simplicity
of the savage life with the refinement and the cleanliness of the
civilized. We fear it must be accepted as an unquestionable fact,
that the many advantages of civilization are to be obtained only
at the price of countless and ceaseless worry. Of course, we must
all sometimes sigh for the woods and the wigwam; but the feeling
is as vain as that of the psalmist's wearied aspiration, 'Oh that
I had wings like a dove: then would I flee away and be at rest!'
Our author says,
The great Von Humboldt went into the cottages of South American
Indiana, and, amongst an unwrinkled people, could with difficulty
discern who was the father and who was the son, when he saw the
family assembled together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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