It is with some misgivings of feeling that I have dwelt thus at length on difficulties and anxieties incident to the relationship of Curate and Incumbent. But I do not think after all that I shall be misunderstood. In the nature of the case, the bright sides of the matter have hardly needed comment. The Curate who finds himself the favoured and advantaged helper of some true-hearted leader needs little counsel from me, unless it be in face of the fact, on which we have touched, that the noblest leaders in the Lord in the whole English Church are not above parochial criticism, or even parochial slander. But I do know that there are Curates whose circumstances are less favourable; and I long to impress it upon them that few Christians have a larger and more fruitful field than they for the cultivation of some of the crowning graces of the Gospel. It is for them to make no common proof of the power of the Indwelling Lord to subdue the iniquities of His people, to hallow their inmost spirits, to set before their lips the watch and ward of His blessed Presence, to drive utterly away from their pastoral souls the wretched spirit of sarcasm, to enable them for an unselfish faithfulness when no eye but the unseen Master's oversees.
It is no part of the system of the Church of England, as it is of that of the Church of Rome, to put a man (or a woman) under the "spiritual direction" of a fellow-sinner, who is to be, for the "directed," the organ and representative of the will of God. For such a method is no part of the apostolic Gospel, which never for a moment bids us surrender conscience into the keeping of another. "Who art thou that judgest _Another's_ servant? To his _own Master_ he standeth or falleth" [Rom. xiv. 4.]; words which deeply and decisively contradict the root-ideas of spiritual despotism, for they teach us to think of our fellow-Christians, as if--for purposes of the conscience--He who is their Master and ours was, for them, _another_ Master than ours.[14] Yet the ideas of spiritual despotism are only the distortion or parody of ideas which are as true and sacred as the Gospel can make them; the ideas of self-abnegation for the good of others, and of resolute denial of the miserable spirit which prefers self to others and talks about rights when we should be intent on duties. The Christian man, and _‡ fortiori_ the Minister of Christ, is called (as we have seen in earlier pages) to nothing less than a life in which, while conscience is inviolable, self is surrendered to Christ, in that practical sense of the words which means surrender, for His sake, _to others_, in all things which concern not right and wrong but our self-will.