l, and the practical work of life is the grist ground.
The reason our soldiers failed in some of the battles was because their
stomachs had for several days been innocent of everything but "hard tack."
See that your minister has a full haversack. Feed him on gruel during the
week and on Sunday he will give you gruel. What is called the "parson's
nose" in a turkey or fowl is an allegory setting forth that in many
communities the minister comes out behind.

Eight hundred or a thousand dollars for a minister is only a slow way of
killing him, and is the worst style of homicide. Why do not the trustees
and elders take a mallet or an axe, and with one blow put him out of his
misery? The damage begins in the college boarding house. The theological
student has generally small means, and he must go to a cheap boarding
house. A frail piece of sausage trying to swim across a river of gravy on
the breakfast plate, but drowned at last, "the linked sweetness long drawn
out" of flies in the molasses cup, the gristle of a tough ox, and measly
biscuit, and buckwheat cakes tough as the cook's apron, and old peas in
which the bugs lost their life before they had time to escape from the
saucepan, and stale cucumbers cut up into small slices of cholera
morbus,--are the provender out of which we are trying at Princeton and Yale
and New Brunswick to make sons of thunder. Sons of mush! From such
depletion we step gasping into the pulpit, and look so heavenly pale that
the mothers in Israel are afraid we will evaporate before we get through
our first sermon.

Many of our best young men in preparation for the ministry are going
through this martyrdom. The strongest mind in our theological class
perished, the doctors said afterward from lack of food. The only time he
could afford a doctor was for his post-mortem examination.

I give the financial condition of many of our young theological students
when I say:

Income $250 00
Outgo:
Board at $3 per week (cheap place) 156 00
Clothing (shoddy) 100 00
Books (no morocco) 25 00
Traveling expenses 20 00

Total $301 00

Here you see a deficit of fifty-one dollars. As there are no "stealings" in
a theological seminary, he makes up the balance by selling books or
teaching school. He comes into life cowed down, with a patch on both knees
and several other p