482 THE GERMAN REFORMATION. A.D. 1517 To 1530.
a Protestant country pastor who moves among his flock as a father, friend, and comforter, and enforces his teaching of domestic virtues and affections by his example, speaking louder than words. The beauty of this relation has often been the theme of secular poets. Everybody knows Oliver Goldsmith’s “Vicar of Wakefield,” which describes with charming simplicity and harmless humor the trials and patience, the domestic, social, and professional virtues of a country pastor, and begins with the characteristic sentence: “I was ever of opinion, that the honest man who married, and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single, and only talked of population; from this motive I had scarcely taken orders a year, before I chose my wife, as she did her wedding-gown, not for a fine glossy face, but for such qualities as would wear well.” Herder read this English classic four times, and commended it to his bride as one of the best books in any language. Goethe, who himself tasted the charm of a pastoral home in the days of his purest and strongest love to Friederike of Sesenheim, praises the “ Vicar of Wakefield,” as “one of the best novels, with the additional advantage of being thoroughly moral, yea in a genuine sense Christian,” and makes the general assertion: “A Protestant country pastor is perhaps the most beautiful topic for a modern idyl; he appears like Melchizedek, as priest and king in one person. He is usually associated by occupation and outward condition with the most innocent conceivable estate on earth, that of the farmer; he is father, master of his house, and thoroughly identified with his congregation. On this pure, beautiful earthly foundation, rests his higher vocation: to introduce men into life,
writers Meta Heusser, Elizabeth Prentiss, Mrs. Stowe), among poets; John Wesley, Monod, Krummacher, Spurgeon, H. W. Beecher, R.S. Storrs, among preachers; Jonathan Edwards, Schleiermacher, Hengstenberg, Nitzsch, Julius Miller, Dorner, Dean Stanley, among divines; Swedenborg, the seer; with a large number of prominent and useful clergymen, lawyers, and physicians, in all Protestant countries.
§ 79. REFLECTIONS ON CLERICAL FAMILY LIFE. 483
to care for their spiritual education, to bless, to instruct, to strengthen, to comfort them in all the epochs of life, and, if the comfort for the present is not sufficient, to cheer them with the assured hope of a more happy future.”! In his idyl ‘¢ Hermann und Dorothea,” he introduces a clergyman as an ornament and benefactor of the community. It is to the credit of this greatest and most cultured of modern poets, that he, like Shakspeare and Schiller, never disparaged the - clerical profession.
In his “ Deserted Village,” Goldsmith gives another picture of the village preacher as
‘* A man who was to all the country dear, And passing rich on forty pounds a year... . At church, with meek and unaffected grace, His looks adorned the venerable place; Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway, And fools who came to scoff remained to pray.”’
From a higher spiritual plane William Wordsworth, the brother of an Anglican clergyman and uncle of two bishops, describes the character of a Protestant pastor in his “ Ecclesiastical Sonnets.”
** A genial hearth, a hospitable board, And a refined rusticity, belong To the neat mansion, where, his flock among, The learned Pastor dwells, their watchful lord. Though meek and patient as a sheathéd sword ; Though pride’s least lurking thought appear a wrong To human kind; though peace be on his tongue, Gentleness in his heart — can earth afford Such genuine state, pre-eminence so free, As when, arrayed in Christ’s authority, He from the pulpit lifts his awful hand; Conjures, implores, and labors all he can For re-subjecting to divine command The stubborn spirit of rebellious man!”’
1 From the tenth book of his Wahrheit und Dichtung. Herder directed his attention to the ‘‘ Vicar,’’ while they studied at Strassburg, and read it to him aloud in German translation. In the same book Goethe describes in fascinating style his visits to the parsonage of Sesenheim.