ss you have teachers and guides, you will not be able to
know, and if you do not know, then you cannot do the will of My Father.
At this news, when the elders of Mansoul brought it to the people, the
whole town came running together, and all with one consent implored His
Majesty that He would forthwith establish such a ministry among them as
might teach them both law and judgment, statute and commandment, so that
they might be documented in all good and wholesome things. So He told
them that He would graciously grant their requests and would straightway
establish such a ministry among them.

Now, I will not enter to-night on the abstract benefits of such an
Establishment. I will rather take one of the ministers who was presented
to one of the parishes of Mansoul, and shall thus let you see how that
State Church worked out practically in one of its ministers at any rate.
And the preacher and pastor I shall so take up was neither the best
minister in the town nor the worst; but, while a long way subordinate to
the best, he was also by no means the least. The Reverend Mr. Conscience
was our parish minister's name; his people sometimes called him The
Recorder.

1. Well, then, to begin with, the Rev. Mr. Conscience was a native of
the same town in which his parish church now stood. I am not going to
challenge the wisdom of the patron who appointed his protege to this
particular living; only, I have known very good ministers who never got
over the misfortune of having been settled in the same town in which they
had been born and brought up. Or, rather, their people never got over
it. One excellent minister, especially, I once knew, whose father had
been a working man in the town, and his son had sometimes assisted his
father before he went to college, and even between his college sessions,
and the people he afterwards came to teach could never get over that. It
was not wise in my friend to accept that presentation in the
circumstances, as the event abundantly proved. For, whenever he had to
take his stand in his pulpit or in his pastorate against any of their
evil ways, his people defended themselves and retaliated on him by
reminding him that they knew his father and his mother, and had not
forgotten his own early days. No doubt, in the case of Emmanuel and
Mansoul and its minister, there were counterbalancing considerations and
advantages both to minister and people; but it is not always so; and it
was not so in