SALARIES OF CLERGYMEN

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Mountain View, California · Jul 19, 1905

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 31, No. 29.

SALARIES OF CLERGYMEN.

[Leslie's Monthly Magazine, for November.]

SOME clergymen receive eighteen hundred dollars a year for their services, when the church is a large one, situated in a growing city. Those in the smaller towns have yearly salaries ranging from four hundred to twelve hundred dollars—salaries which they are not always able to collect. In a group of two hundred churches, including a fair average of city, small city, and country, parishes in and about New York, the average salary is seven hundred and twenty-five dollars. Such a condition is not attractive to a young, college-bred man who, tho unselfishly earnest for the church, is human, with ambitions for the comfortable home that his abilities ought to earn. The result is the repeated statement that the inferior men are going into the ministry; that "if a man can't do anything else, he either teaches or preaches; and that if he can't teach, he preaches." And yet it is doubtful if there is a field for practical achievement in America as large as that offered by the Protestant ministry.