has been in a most precarious state. We are
hourly anticipating the loss of our eldest daughter,
and heart-broken as we are, our grief is
doubly embittered by the thought that we know
not where to seek the means to bury her. . .
When I read of the streams of Christian
benevolence which have this last Christmas made
glad so many desolate hearts and homes — when
I compare their need, great as it is, with ours,
the harder to bear from the gentle nurture which
gives us a power of suffering which the lowly
poor mercifully have not, I lift up my cry to
Him who careth for us, and beseech Him to
send help and hope to our weary hearts."

Here it may be said that the husband was
consumptive, and should not have married. Was
it because he was consumptive that he had the
income of a washerwoman after three-and-twenty
years of service in the Church? Much of the
privation in most cases follows upon marriage.
The incomes of much more than one half our
clergy will not properly enable them to support
families. Yet who does not know how wholesome
—even necessary—is the minister's wife in
a parish, how desirable it is for the success of
many of his sick-bed ministrations that he
should be one who is himself head of a family.
In many rural parishes, and in town parishes
too, the craving of a refined gentleman for equal
sympathy and solace there is not a friend to
satisfy. The whole spirit of the English Church
and people demands and creates clergymen that
shall come out of their own homes blessed by
their own home affections, and taught by their
own home trials, among the homes of their
parishioners. It is not imprudent in an English
clergyman to marry, sad as are the trials
marriage may entail. Let him find, if he can, a
brave good woman to work with him, and to die
with him, if needs must!

Again, let it be remembered that these starved
men are not men who hunger because they want
wit to find work, or industry to do the work
they find. Many of them are as well educated
as the archbishops themselves; they have more
than their share of work given them to do, and
do it. It is, in fact, by these men of the lower
ten thousand that the greater part of the real
work of the Church is done. In the midst of
their own sufferings they preach and pray,
comfort the poor, visit the sick, devote their whole
lives to their duty, and bear silently their burden
of neglect.

They may be silent for many motives lower
than the highest, yet the silence has been, and
is, noble. If gentlemen, drawn from the same
class of life, took clerkships, not in holy orders
but in civil service, where no question of sacred
things, but only one of self-interest occurred,
and if they could then be left to earn less than
a hundred a year after forty years of service,
with a certainty of being unprovided for when
they had worked out their strength, their cry
would ring throughout the nation. Especially
if, like the clergy, they had been required to
qualify themselves for such a calling by the
most expensive form of education. No fear of
further injury to their neglected interests would
ever abate a breath of any one. It is, then, a
generous sense of decorum, a respect in these
neglected workers for the sacred nature of their
work, that has to this hour made them silent
except in the secret petition founded on a
hope that may wring out from the heart of a
gentleman a note like this :

"May I be permitted to ask whether your
Society distributes blankets ? If so, may I be
allowed to solicit the benefit of a pair for one of
my poor children ? (a daughter in consumption).
The feeling that my child is suffering the cold
of this keen frost emboldens me to entreat a
share in the bounty of your Society."

Of another clergyman, after twenty-one years'
service, the income is ninety-two pounds, out of
which he has twenty to pay for house-rent. He
maintains a wife and nine children upon this, or
rather, as he writes, " I have hitherto struggled
to maintain my family with a character for
integrity and uprightness, but find myself now
almost overwhelmed, chiefly by exertions which
I have made to keep up an insurance on my
life for a few hundred pounds for the benefit of
my family."

Here is a clergyman's history given in more
detail :

"I am of twenty-five years' standing, and for
that period have only received an average income
of forty-four pounds per annum, and at present
I have eighty pounds per annum, out of which I
have to maintain a delicate wife and young
family, and to contend against difficulties which
have arisen in former years from such very
scanty means. I have struggled on unaided
hitherto, from a painful conviction that there
were so many of my brethren worse off even
than myself; but during the last two months the
death of my wife's mother, which has compelled
us all to go into mourning, has rendered it
absolutely necessary that I should at last apply to
you for aid in my deep need. I am a curate in
sole charge of a large parish. I have struggled
on till I can struggle no longer, without the
cause of our beloved Church suffering through
my deep poverty and inability to obtain even
the necessaries of life, as you will readily
believe, when I tell you that, within the last three
months, I have been wearing a coat in rags,
and shoes which, from my inability to get them
mended, let in water every time I put them on;
and for weeks together we have not been able to
get a dinner in the house from Sunday to
Sunday, but have been compelled to allow
ourselves out two meals a day, and those two
composed of tea without sugar, and bread without
butter. These are painful facts, and render
some help absolutely necessary to save us from
absolute starvation and complete ruin."

Gratitude for second-hand clothes comes
often in letters to the Poor Clergy Relief
Society. That the rosy undergraduate who
pulled a cheery stroke at the oar, should, after
a life's labour and devotion, come to this:
"Your kind parcel was opened with a feeling of
deep thankfulness and gratitude, because there