1.F 09. A Small Parish at First

A Small Parish at First. In your first settlement, young gentlemen, remember the parable. When you are invited to a feast, take not the highest seat, but take rather the lowest place, so that it shall be said to you, Friend, go up higher.” When a young man is just going out, and is beginning to preach, and men find great hopes in him, one of the worst things that can befall him is to think himself an uncommon man, a man of prospects, and to have it whispered here and there, “ Oh, he will shake the world yet! “ These things are very mischievous to a young man, especially if they lead him to start at a faster pace than he can well maintain.

One of the most common mistakes a young man makes is in thinking that he must have a place large enough for his talents he does not know where to bestow his goods! If there is an opportunity to take a small country place he will take it “just temporarily,” but he has his eye on four or five calls, which he thinks are very likely to come to him. This conceit is very deleterious. When you enter upon the work of the ministry it is very desirable that you should take a small and humble sphere, even if you afterward are called to a large one. You should begin at the bottom. In the first place, you cannot develop so well in any other way the needful creative and administrative faculties. If I were Pope in America, besides a hundred other things that would be done, I would send every young man that was anxious to preach into the extreme West, and I would make him think that he was never coming back again. He should work there for ten years, then I think he might begin to be ready for a larger place, or an older church. I would not let him know my future plans for him; but he should think he was going to remain there, and do his work, One especial advantage of a small parish is that you are obliged to do your work by knowing every person in the community, studying every one of them, and knowing how to impress and manage them by your personal influence and the power of the gospel. Every young minister, too, ought to have a parish where he shall have some time to study, where he shall not be hurried and worried with extra meetings, with excitements and with various distractions. When you first begin to preach you have a raw, untrained nervous system, which cannot bear so much as it can afterward. A man’s brain gets tough by exercise. I can now go through an amount of brain-work that would have killed me outright in the first years of my ministerial life. I can trace the gradually accumulating power of endurance of brain excitement.