The village clergyman and the village doctor are great friends of mine;
they come to visit me often, and smoke a pipe with me in my garden. The
twain love and respect each other, but they regard the world from
different points of view, and I am now and again made witness of a
good-humoured passage of arms. The clergyman is old, unmarried, and a
humorist. His sallies and his gentle eccentricities seldom provoke
laughter, but they are continually awakening the pleasantest smiles.
Perhaps what he has seen of the world, its sins, its sorrows, its
death-beds, its widows and orphans, has tamed his spirit, and put a
tenderness into his wit. I do not think I have ever encountered a man
who so adorns his sacred profession. His pious, devout nature produces
sermons just as naturally as my apple-trees produce apples. He is a tree
that flowers every Sunday. Very beautiful is his reverence for the Book,
his trust in it; through long acquaintance, its ideas have come to
colour his entire thought, and you come upon its phrases in his
ordinary speech. He is more himself in the pulpit than anywhere else,
and you get nearer him in his sermons than you do sitting with him at
his tea-table, or walking with him on the country roads. He does not
feel confined in his orthodoxy; in it he is free as a bird in the air.
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