For Neophytes

"I wish," mused Rev. William MacDougall Hay of Long Hill, Conn.'s Grace Church, writing in the Episcopalian Living Church last week, "some old and wise priest would write a little book of Advice to the Just-Ordained."

Thereupon wise, 50-year-old Pastor Hay, husky, six-foot father of three, proceeded to sketch his idea of what such a book should say. Excerpts:

"Take your young priest, called largely on account of his youth and supposed harmlessness, and placed in charge of a parish. Now this parish contains, as many do, a dowager of some wealth, decided (though foolish) opinions, a rather overpowering presence, and a surpassing supply of vulgar bad manners which she complacently regards as frank common sense. ... As such dowagers, male and female, are fairly common in our milieu, shouldn't the priest be pre-advised just how to mingle firmness and kindness so as to persuade this particular pest either to pipe down or to jump in the lake? . . .

"There should be a chapter on Anger. Repressed rage is one of man's grandest endowments, and I wouldn't give a straw for a man who couldn't on occasion bite a crowbar in two in pure dancing fury. But--don't do it; you simply spoil the crowbar or break a tooth. . . .

"We have all thought, afterwards, of the cruelly perceptive remark we might have made, if we had just been a little quicker. How it would have pierced and hurt, how it would have silenced some parish pest! Unfortunately, there have been times when the poisonous dart lay ready to our tongue at the needful moment, and we have loosed it sharp and straight at some man's folly--but it hit his heart. It struck in those mysterious depths where each man tries to maintain a little shy and secret self-respect. . . .

"The first page of this book should contain the words 'Don't Get Married Yet.' How many a man has got himself all tangled up in the bonds of matrimony before he considered if he might not have a vocation to celibacy, before even suspecting that there is such a vocation. . .

"Suppose that it be made the normal thing that nine out of ten (making a far too-generous allowance of 10% for crackpots, misfits, melancholies) of each year's ordinands shall pledge themselves not to marry for two (or four to six) years, making a special offering to God of the gold of those years, and going with a willing mind wherever a bishop sends them. Let their pay in money be ... no more than sufficient for their own actual needs, for food, shelter, and especially boots. . . .

"This new delayed attitude toward marriage could within four years be achieved, if bishops would put their combined foot down. . . .

"What work could be undertaken if it didn't cost so much! What places and people could be reached and held, if a priest solus could be sent! The whole face and emphasis of our American Church could be transformed in six or eight years. . . .

"Of course, it's lovely to dream of every little hamlet having its own little priest, and him his own little wife, and them their own little darling, all together (icebox and all) in their own little rectory. But it might be wiser to wake up.

"These peripatetic priests could never afterward forget God's poor, the defeated, the lonely; their speech would bear the accent of the man who has been there. Too hard? The flat truth is, the harder you make it, the more ordinands you will have. Youth never yet was stopped just by a tough proposition."

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