Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 18 September 1884 — THE SONS OF PREACHERS. [ARTICLE]

THE SONS OF PREACHERS.

An Endeavor to Trace the Causes of Their Wandering from the Narrow Path. It is often asked why sons of ministers go astray. There are many explanations why the children of men without wordly attachments might break away from the dull dignity of a mere teacher of a flock whose parishoners are quick to judge his children, and they beebine restive under the excessive restraint imposed on them as the sons of the best man in town. A reason for the errantry of preachers’ sons I consider to be in the ambitious nature of their fathers. There is not so proud a thing on the globe as an ecclesiastic. The man put in a pulpit several times a week to champion his sect, his theology, or the passing question in mbrals, becomes in the exercise of his disputative power a proud, vehement, impetuous person. It was so before the ecclesiastics had either wives or sons. It was so when Wolsey was a greater man than the King of England, and Richelieu greater than the King of France. It was so when the son of Pope Alexander, he who gave America to Spain in the name of heaven, made all Europe the theater for his ambition and revenge. Not unfrequently an ambitious young man chooses the pulpit in preference to any profession he can think of. This occupation often attracts young men at college who obtain some applause platform speeches. They consider that medicine and law involve too much drudgery and probation, while the pulpit lets the young tyro loose from the very beginning, to declaim not only to men but to women. In England, where the clergyman has living, or a rectory, or parish, from which he is not removed all his life, it is natural for the sons also' to take the father's business as the sons of a miller would run a mill, and the grandson after that. In that way the Wesley family were for three generations priests. Where there is talent in a clergyman’s children, it is frequently willful and precocious, like the aggressive nature of the father, thundering away by the hour at his flock. The library of the preacher lies open to the boys. They find in it not the lessons of humility, yet they are Expected to be living manikins to illustrate what their father is preaching about. Besides, there is a certain aristocracy in preachers’ sons. They have seen their father in control of ; a large congregation, demi-magisterial, in the little town he lives in, and they do not take kindly to trades or even to clerkships. There is, or there was, seldom enough money to bring up the children in accordance with their self-esteem. So a sensitive, unnatural pride akin to aristocracy lives even in-the-ehildi-and-when it carries him in some tempest of indignation or revolt away from the monastic discipline of home, lie becomes an object of notice, and then a certain re-morse—-the return of his better nature, or, rather, of the strict and superstitious teachings he has received—deepens his thoughts and passions. The men I have been describing are nearly all models of worldly and not of divine perfection.— Gath.