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
Well, it can be done: but it costs an effort. Great part of the
work of the civilized and educated man consists of that which the
savage, and even the uneducated man, would not regard as work at
all. The things which cost the greatest effort may be done, perhaps,
as you sit in an easy chair with your eyes shut. And such an effort
is that of making up our mind to many things, both in our own lot,
and in the lot of others. I mean not merely the intellectual effort
to look at the success of other men and our own failure in such a
way as that we shall be intellectually convinced that, we have no
right to complain of either: I do not mean merely the labour to
put things in the right point of view: but the moral effort to look
fairly at the facts not in any way disguised,--not tricked out by
some skilful art of putting things;--and yet to repress all wrong
feeling;--all fretfulness, envy, jealousy, dislike, hatred. I do
not mean, to persuade ourselves that the grapes are sour; but (far
nobler surely) to be well aware that they are sweet, and yet be
content that another should have them and not we. I mean the labour,
when you have run in a race and been beaten, to resign your mind
to the fact that you have been beaten, and to bear a kind feeling
towards the man who beat you. And this is labour, and hard labour;
though very different from that physical exertion which the uncivilized
man would understand by the word. Every one can understand that to
carry a heavy portmanteau a mile is work. Not every one remembers
that the owner of the portmanteau, as he walks on carrying nothing
weightier than an umbrella, may be going through exertion much
harder than that of the porter. Probably St. Paul never spent
days of harder work in all his life, than the days he spent lying
blind at Damascus, struggling to get free from the prejudices and
convictions of all his past years, and resolving--on the course he
would pursue in the years to come.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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