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Untitled Article
to their doubts , and difficulties , and sufferings ; who can kindly encour age , or rebuke , or advise them ; who prays with them , and helps them to pray for themselves ,- and who has aided them in being happier , by aiding- them in being better than they were ; and he will be cordially welcomed as often as he may visit them . He may , indeed , in many cases , feel strong doubts of
the usefulness of his labours . But he will also see precious fruits of them . Nort painful as are some of the scenes through which he must pass , and trying as are some of the circumstances that must occur in this ministry , do I believe that there is a department of the sacred office that is either more useful than this , or one that will yield greater satisfactions than will be found by him who heartily engages in it . —Pp 5—11 ,
" The second object of this service is the assistance of parents in the education and the care of their children . " It should be an aim of the Minister at large to know all the children in every family of the district in which he makes his pastoral visits . The children will also know him as the friend and religious teacher of their parents ; and his influence in this character will be felt . He will also have the power , and it will be known that he has it , and that , if it be necessary , he will use it , to bring the child who will neither yield to command nor to persuasion ,
under an authority to which he must submit . Suppose him , then , as he passes from house to house , to be as regular in his inquiries respecting the children as he is respecting the spiritual interests of their parents . He will find some parents who feel but little interest in the character or conduct of their children . But he will find also broken-hearted mothers , whose tears and sobs will awaken his strongest sympathy , and by whom the offer of his aid in rescuing their children from sin and destruction will be received with a gratitude which is to be fully conceived only by him who has witnessed it .
He will fi « d children who are kept from school by the want of books , with which their parents cannot supply them ; and others , by the want of clothes . He will find some who are kept at home in the winter to gather chips , or to beg ; and others , between the ages of nine and fourteen , who are much of their time employed as errand boys in shops and offices , and on whose wages the parent , or the parents , depend perhaps for the payment of the rent of their rooms , but who are yet often at home in idleness , and exposed to the most vicious influences . And he will find truant boys whom their parents cannot
keep at school ; profane and quarrelsome boys , the great annoyance of the neighbourhood in which they live ; boys who have made some advances in the arts of petty pilfering ; and even lads who have begun the guilty indulgence , in which , if they are not soon arrested , they will sink into the debasement of early confirmed intemperance . It will not , therefore , I think , be doubted whether the Minister be suitably employed , and well employed , in the work of putting as many as may be possible of these children into a school , and of maintaining an oversight of those whom he has placed there , that he may be sure of their faithful attendance . Or , where there are those who scoff at
parental controul , and whose vicious example exposes others to corruption and ruin , let the parent be assisted to find masters for them whom they dare not disobey , or to place them in the school of reformation at South Boston . The difficulties are neither few nor small which will sometimes arise in the discharge of this part of a Minister ' s duty ; but its compensations will also be great , if he shall assuage and even heal the anguish of many a parent ' s heart ; and shall save , as I believe that he may , many children not only from ignorance , but from moral death .
" In the third and last department of the duties of a Minister at large , I would include all those acts and offices by which he may relieve the poor in their immediate and most pressing necessities , or aid them in the improvement of their temporal condition . Here I am aware that an objection may arise in the mines of same , who may otherwise view with favour the cause which I am pleading ' . The charity of a Minister , it may be said , and has been said , will lend to pretensions of piety , and to base bypocriay , as a means
Untitled Article
318 City Missions .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), May 2, 1831, page 318, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2597/page/30/
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