After all, to his profession and parish the preacher is in debt.
Exquisite rewards his work yields. If controversy arise on some point
with his friends, there may, after a while, be no remnant of hard
feeling,--as there are heavy cannonades, and no bit of wadding picked
up. Those who have striven with or defamed may come to cherish him all
the more for their alienation. Those who could not hear him, or, when
they heard, thought him too long, or what they heard did not like, may
own with him, out of their discontent, closer and sweeter bonds. His
business is expansive in its nature. The seasons of human life in
broad representation are always before him. How many moral springs and
summers, autumns and winters he sees, till he can hardly tell whether
his musing on this curious existence be memory or hope, retrospect
of earth or prospect of heaven! and he begins to think the spiritual
world abolishes distinctions of spheres and times, as parents, that
were his lambs, bring their babes to his arms, and, even in the
flesh, his mortal passing into eternal vision, he beholds, as in
vivid dreaming, other parents leading their children on other shores,
unseen, though hard by.
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