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
thoughtful, heart and a kindly hand which are far away. Yes, cut
down your present income to any extent, that you may make some
provision for your children after you are dead. You do not wish
that they should have the saddest of all reasons for taking care
of you, and trying to lengthen out your life. But even after you
have done everything which your small means permit, you will still
think, with an anxious heart, of the possibilities of Future Years.
A man or woman who has children has very strong reason for wishing
to live as long as may be, and has no right to trifle with, health
or life. And sometimes, looking out into days to come, you think
of the little things, hitherto so free from man's heritage of care,
as they may some day be. You see them shabby, and early anxious:
can that be the little boy's rosy face, now so pale and thin? You
see them in a poor room, in which you recognize your study chairs,
with the hair coming out of the cushions, and a carpet which you
remember now threadbare and in holes.
It is no wonder at all that people are so anxious about money. Money
means every desirable material thing on earth, and the manifold
immaterial things which come of material possessions. Poverty is the
most comprehensive earthly evil; all conceivable evils, temporal,
spiritual, and eternal, may come of that. Of course, great temptations
attend its opposite; and the wise man's prayer will be what it was
long ago--'Give me neither poverty nor riches.' But let us have no
nonsense talked about money being of no consequence. The want of
it has made many a father and mother tremble at the prospect of
being taken from their children; the want of it has embittered many
a parent's dying hours. You hear selfish persons talking vaguely
about faith. You find such heartless persons jauntily spending all
they get on themselves, and then leaving their poor children to
beggary, with the miserable pretext that they are doing all this
through their abundant trust in God. Now this is not faith; it is
insolent presumption. It is exactly as if a man should jump from
the top of St. Paul's, and say that he had faith that the Almighty
would keep him from being dashed to pieces on the pavement. There
is a high authority as to such cases--'Thou shalt not tempt the Lord
thy God.' If God had promised that people should never fall into
the miseries of penury under any circumstances, it would be faith
to trust that promise, however unlikely of fulfilment it might seem
in any particular case. But God has made no such promise; and if
you leave your children without provision, you have no right to
expect that they shall not suffer the natural consequences of your
heartlessness and thoughtlessness. True faith lies in your doing
everything you possibly can, and then humbly trusting in God, And
if, after you have done your very best, you must still go, with
but a blank outlook for those you leave, why, then, you may trust
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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