the minister's wages. There are churches which pay their pastors eight
hundred dollars per annum. What these good men do with so much money we
cannot imagine. Our ministers must be taken in. If by occasional fasting
for a day our Puritan fathers in New England became so good, what might we
not expect of our ministers if we kept them in perpetual fast? No doubt
their spiritual capacity would enlarge in proportion to their shrinkage at
the waistcoat. The average salary of ministers in the United States is
about six hundred dollars. Perhaps by some spiritual pile-driver we might
send it down to five hundred dollars; and then the millennium, for the lion
by that time would be so hungry he would let the lamb lie down inside of
him. We would suggest a very economical plan: give your spiritual adviser a
smaller income, and make it up by a donation visit. When everything else
fails to keep him properly humble, that succeeds. We speak from experience.
Fourteen years ago we had one, and it has been a means of grace to us ever
since.

Secondly. For securing poor preaching, wait on your pastor with frequent
committees. Let three men some morning tie their horses at the dominie's
gate, and go in and tell him how to preach, and pray, and visit. Tell him
all the disagreeable things said about him for six months, and what a great
man his predecessor was, how much plainer his wife dressed, and how much
better his children behaved. Pastoral committees are not like the
small-pox--you can have them more than once; they are more like the mumps,
which you may have first on one side and then on the other. If, after a man
has had the advantage of being manipulated by three church committees, he
has any pride or spirit left, better give him up as incorrigible.

Thirdly. To secure poor preaching, keep the minister on the trot. Scold him
when he comes to see you because he did not come before, and tell him how
often you were visited by the former pastor. Oh, that blessed predecessor!
Strange they did not hold on to the angel when they had him. Keep your
minister going. Expect him to respond to every whistle. Have him at all the
tea parties and "the raisings." Stand him in the draught of the door at the
funeral--a frequent way of declaring a pulpit vacant. Keep him busy all the
week in out-door miscellaneous work; and if at the end of that time he
cannot preach a weak discourse, send for us, and we will show him how to do
it. Of course there are e