That which really makes the country parson’s position a cheerless and trying one is its absolute _finality_. Dante’s famous line ought to be carved upon the lintel of every country parsonage in England. When the new rector on his induction takes the key of the church, locks himself in, and tolls the bell, it is his own passing bell that he is ringing. He is shutting himself out from any hope of a further career upon earth. He is a man transported for life, to whom there will come no reprieve. Whether he be the sprightly and sanguine young bachelor of twenty-four who takes the family living; or the podgy plebeian whose uncle the butcher has bought the advowson for a song; or the college tutor, fastidious, highly cultured, even profoundly learned, who has accepted university preferment; or the objectionable and quarrelsome man, whom it was necessary to provide for by “sending into the country”;--be he who he may, gifted or very much the reverse, careless or earnest, slothful or zealous, genial, eloquent, wise, and notoriously successful in his ministrations, or the veriest stick and humdrum that ever snivelled through a homily--from the day that he accepts a country benefice he is a shelved man, and is put upon the retired list as surely as the commander in the navy who disappears on half-pay. I do not mean only that the country parson is never promoted to the higher dignities in the Church, or that cathedral preferment is very rarely bestowed upon him; but I do mean that he is never moved from the benefice in which he has once been planted. You may ply me with instances to the contrary here and there, but they are instances only numerous enough to illustrate the universality of the law which prevails--_Once a country parson always a country parson_; where he finds himself there he has to stay.
As long as the patronage of ecclesiastical preferment in the Church of England remains in the hands it has remained in for a thousand years and more, and as long as the tenure of the benefice continues to be as it is and as it has been since feudal times, I can see no remedy and no prospect that things should go on otherwise than they do now. Give a man some future in whatever position you put him, and he will be content to give you all his best energies, his time, his strength, his fortune, in return for the chance of recognition that he may sooner or later reasonably look forward to; but there is no surer way of making the ablest man a _fainéant_ at the best, a soured and angry revolutionist at the second best, and something even more odious and degraded at the worst, than to shut him up in a cage like Sterne’s starling, and bid him sing gaily and hop briskly from perch to perch till the end of his days, with a due supply of sopped bread crumbs and hemp seed found for him from hour to hour, and a sight of the outer world granted him--only through the bars.