ssible for me to support my family on four hundred dollars; and had
I not been assured that at least three or four hundred dollars extra
would be made up during the year, I never would have dreamed of
accepting the call. It has been a principle with me not to go in debt;
and since I have been a man, I have not, until this time, owed a
dollar; and should not have owed it now, had I received, since I have
resided in C-- the income I fully expected."

Mr. Malcolm spoke with warmth, for he felt some risings of the natural
man at the indifference with which a promise of so much consequence to
him had been disregarded.

"How much do you owe?" inquired the vestryman.

"About two hundred dollars."

"Indeed! so much?"

A bitter remark arose to the minister's lips, but he forced himself to
keep silence. He was a man, with all the natural feelings of a man.

"Well, I suppose we must make it for you somehow," said Mr. Elder, the
tone in which he spoke showing that the subject worried him. "Are any
of the demands on you pressing?" he inquired, after a pause.

"All of them are pressing," replied the minister. "I am dunned every
day."

"Indeed! That's bad!" returned Mr. Elder, speaking with more real
kindness and sympathy than at first. "I am sorry you have been
permitted to get into so unpleasant a situation."

"It certainly is very unpleasant, and entirely destroys my peace. Were
I not thus unhappily situated, I should not have said a word to you on
the subject of my salary."

"Don't let it distress you so much, Mr. Malcolm. I will see that the
amount you need is at once made up."

The minister returned home, disturbed, mortified, and humiliated.

"If this is the way they pay their minister," he remarked to his wife,
after relating to her what had happened, "it is the last year that I
shall enjoy the benefits of their peculiar system. But little good will
my preaching or that of any one else do them, while they disregard the
first and plainest principles of honesty. There is no lack of ability
to give a minister the support he needs; and the withholding of that
support, or the supplying of it by constraint, shows a moral obtuseness
that argues but poorly for their love of any thing but themselves. I
believe that the labourer is worthy of his hire; that when men build a
church and call a minister for their own spiritual good, they are bound
to supply his natural wants; and that, if they fail to do so, it is a
sign to t