NO ENFORCED MINISTERIAL CELIBACY.
By Editor
THE editor of the Christian Advocate, commenting on an advertisement for four pastors at four hundred dollars a year, to do circuit work, and the remark of a contemporary that the church thus advertising "ought to establish a monastic order and teach its ministers to live like Italians," gives utterance to the following good sense:— The glory of Protestantism as distinguished from Catholicism is that there is no enforced celibacy. Wherever its ministers live they exhibit to the people a Christian home; at least that is the ideal, and the majority of them reach it. To live in this country like Italians requires a climate very much like Italy. When the Italians come to this country they do not live as they did there, unless compelled to by absolute poverty. Four hundred dollars a year is less than is paid to hod-carriers in this city, and no more than is paid to hod-carriers in the country. A minister needs books and papers and clothes suitable for society and the pulpit. On circuit work ministers get a great deal more than four hundred dollars in the way of gifts from the people—not of money—but of food and other things. We have never been happier than when looking out of the window of a house in which we were boarded and lodged for two dollars and fifty cents per week, and seeing some hod-carriers going up and down who received eighty-six dollars a year more than we did, allowing for their holidays. It had cost them not a cent of money or a minute of time to learn how to go up and down a ladder. It had cost twenty-five hundred dollars and fifteen years of study in preparatory schools and college to fit us in a tolerable degree for the position; yet there were persons in the congregation that thought the salary of three hundred dollars too much! That ministers sometimes marry too young for pastoral efficiency, their own development, and domestic happiness, is true; but there is no need to raise up an order of celibates to keep up circuit work.