Beware Of The Growth Of A Curate'S Party.

I have put a good many supposed cases. How much I should rejoice if I could know that not one reader of this page could find any of my "peradventures" the least in point within his experience. But I must emphasize one of them which is hardly a peradventure at all; namely that the Curate is practically certain, sooner or later, to find temptations presented to his loyalty by the conversation of parishioners. There is not one parish in all England where everybody is pleased with the Incumbent; pleased always and about everything. And if the given Vicar or Rector employs a Curate, and if that Curate is you, it will be a moral miracle if you never hear of such discontents. You will hear of them, very probably, in ways which will offer you, however faintly, an opportunity of acting towards your chief a little as Absalom acted towards David when he expressed certain pious wishes that _he_ were made judge in the land in his father's place. [2 Sam. xv. 1-6.] I do not for a moment mean that you are, or ever will be, a man of treacherous _purposes_; the Lord forbid. But if you do not watch, and are not in some measure forewarned, you may easily be betrayed unawares, quite unawares, into speech or into action which will practically be treacherous to the man who is over you in Christ, and so toward Christ's work and cause in the parish where you serve. Do you not know the possibilities to which I refer? Have they not crossed either your own path or that of some Curate-friend of yours? Is there no such thing as an intimacy formed by the Curate in some house where the Incumbent is not liked, and is that intimacy never used by the Curate _not_ for the noblest ends? Is there no weak listening to parochial gossip on the Curate's part? Is there never any allowance by the younger man of a growth around him, in ways which he could stop summarily, if he tried, of a certain unwholesome sort of preference and popularity? Is it not sometimes known that a Curate condescends so low as to concur with criticisms or sarcasms on his chief, or even to volunteer them? Alas for the parish where there is a "Curate's party," small or more extensive. Happy the parish where no chance is given in that direction by either Incumbent or Curate. Happy the Curate who is so truly loyal and dutiful, it may be even under difficulties, that he makes it quite unmistakable that, if a party is to gather, it must gather around some one else.