Halleck enjoyed the never ending
cooking for this regiment of hungry young men. Some parsons learned to draw
up wills and other legal documents, and thus became on a small scale the
lawyers of the town. Others studied the mystery of medicine, and bought a
small stock of the nauseous drugs of the times, which they retailed
with accompanying advice to their parishioners. Some were coopers, some
carpenters, rope-makers, millers, or cobblers. One cobbler clergyman in
Andover, Vermont, worked at his shoe-mending all the week with his Bible
open on his bench before him, and he marked the page containing any text
which bore on the subject of his coming sermon, with a marker of waxed
shoe-thread. Often the Bible, in his pulpit on Sunday, had thirty or forty
of these shoe-thread guides hanging down from it.
One minister, having been reproved for his worldliness in amassing a large
enough fortune to buy a good farm, answered his complaining congregation
thus: "I have obtained the money to buy this farm by neglecting to follow
the maxim to 'mind my own business.' My business was to study the word of
God and attend to my parish duties and preach good sermons. All this I
acknowledge I have not done, for I have been meddling with your business.
_That_ was to support me and my family; that _you_ have not done.
But remember this: while I have performed your duties, you have not done
mine, so I think you cannot complain.
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