Page:The Parochial System (Wilberforce, 1838).djvu/47

vious; for, besides the erection of one building instead of many, the daily cost of providing for a number of persons in a common hall is known to be far less than would be incurred by them in separate establishments. A considerable saving, again, would result from the great diminution of the number of necessary servants; and each of the clergy would be freed from much expense in the purchase of books, too often a serious charge on a very slender income. But in such an experiment, the moral and religious results would surely far outweigh any merely economical. It is not good for man to be alone; and who is so painfully alone, as he upon whom the care of thousands is ever pressing, who is contending day by day against vice and misery, instructing the ignorant and warning the obstinate; while for himself, as for our first parent in Paradise, no equal friend, companion, and counsellor is found; none of like mind and pursuits, and furnished with a congenial education, with whom he may take sweet counsel, "and walk in the House of God as friends." The biographer mourns over the departure of the meek Hooker "from the tranquillity of his college, from that garden of piety, of pleasure, of peace, and of sweet conversation, into the thorny wilderness of a busy world, into those corroding cares that attend a married priest and a country parsonage;" but how much more corroding, how much more sickening to the heart, the cares of a priest in a