Introduction

Mark Twain (1835-1910) and Mary Abigail Dodge (1833-1896) shared at least one thing in common. Both writers were critics of church life in general and ministers in particular. And both enjoyed making fun of pompous clerics. But the differences between them can be traced back to their starting point. While Twain remained the angry outsider throughout his life, Dodge took advantage of her view from the pew to become the classic insider/outsider – close enough to observe what is going on, yet far enough removed from the inner circle of ecclesiastical power where the power, of course, belonged to the men. Her cool voice is that of the bemused, watchful spectator who is ready to raise the embarrassing question.

After seven years of high school teaching in her native Massachusetts she went to Washington D.C. in 1858 to be the governess of the children of the editor of the anti-slavery paper, the National Era. Soon she became a regular contributor to that organ and eventually to other publications. (She used the name, “Gail Hamilton” for many of her works.) Later in her life she wrote a host of books as well as editing a magazine and exercising some power in Washington social and political circles.

One of her lesser-known works was the sprightly Sermons to the Clergy, from which the following document is drawn. In this book of occasional essays, she enjoyed the rare privilege of talking back to ministers. Her “sermons” offered a running commentary on the vexing issues of church life in the 1870s – Darwin and religion, the veracity of the Bible, the future of missionary work and, not least, the vagaries of church fund-raising. After years of hearing homilies on benevolence, appeals from missionaries and the pleas of other fund-raisers, Dodge had plenty of ammunition for her musings about “Our Charities” and “Religious Beggary.”

She did not paint a pretty picture of American charity in the Gilded Age. For instance, her tart observations about the popular device of the “charity ball” revealed a deeply rooted skepticism about the upper class sponsors of these events. “The real Lady Charity seemeth to be somewhat of a brazen dame, sedulously seeking her own pleasure in the name of the poor.”[1]  After the extravagant ball is over, “charity has only the crumbs that fell from the table.”[2] The same reliance upon vanity was evident in the churches and their practices. “We appeal for charity, not to the necessity of the case, to the conscience or the pity of the beholder, but to his vanity, his pride, his self-interest. A church debt is auctioneered from the pulpit on Sunday. ‘I will give a thousand dollars,’ says A to B, ‘if you will give a thousand dollars.’ But what has A's purse to be with B's? But if the case is a worthy one . . . why should one's man's help be conditioned on another man's?”[3]

Dodge reserved her sharpest barbs for the clergy and especially those “ecclesiastical Fagins” who “may even pick pockets with what dexterity the service of the sanctuary seems to require.”[4] The pages of Sermons to the Clergy contained a devastating and probably unfair portrait of mid-Victorian ministers. She described them as dependent men who were constantly wheedling financial favors from others. The clergy who populated this book were not an attractive lot. Although not as aggressive as the stereotypical “money-grubbing preachers” so popular in American mythology, these ministers seemed utterly preoccupied with money. In that respect alone, if not in others, they embodied the spirit of the Gilded Age.

Whatever the deficiencies inherent in this work, Mary Abigail Dodge was a thoughtful critic of the Protestant teachings about giving. She spotted all manner of inconsistency and incoherence in the usual fund-raising appeals. Her distaste for easy sentimentality and cheap melodramatic tricks makes the following document interesting and instructive to readers who have also encountered their fair share of the same fare in contemporary America.

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Source: Selections from Gail Hamilton (Mary Abigail Dodge), Sermons to the Clergy (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1877).

Our Charities  

At a late meeting of the American Board in Rutland, a great deal was said about giving to the Lord. The point to be driven in was the duty of supporting the various missions undertaken by the churches which act through the Board. One speaker said, in substance, as reported, that “while a Christian man has a right to accumulate all he needs as a capital with which to carry on his business successfully, and make the most money he can for the Lord, yet, when this point is once reached, it should be a serious question, whether the surplus should not all be systematically cast into the Lord's treasury.” Another said that one-tenth was a very small part for a rich man to offer to the Lord. A third advocated the system which makes each one ask, “How much shall I give to the Lord?” A fourth told of the man, who, in the loss of his fortune, rejoiced in what he had given away; for “all he gave to the Lord's treasury was saved, but all he saved for himself had been lost.” And so throughout, and throughout our ecclesiasticism generally, the money which we devote to teaching and extending the gospel is considered money given to the Lord; while the money which we devote to other purposes is money kept to ourselves.

That was the phraseology of the law. But we live under the gospel. When there was a Church and a State of which God was the official and recognized head, the treasury of that Church was the treasury of the Lord; and the offerings which God ordained as one feature of the regular worship were offerings unto the Lord. But that Church and that State government have, by God's own decree, passed away. He stands to us now only in spiritual relations. No one church, no one government, no one person, no one cause, is, officially, any closer to him than any other. He has no treasury apart from our treasury.  There is no peculiar people; “but, in every nation, he that feareth God, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with him.” Phraseology, therefore, which was once strictly accurate, is now only poetically true, and if used too commonly becomes offensive, and if used too strenuously becomes subversive of the truth, a teacher of false doctrine.

Granting to the establishment and support of Christian missions all the usefulness and importance which their most devoted founders claim, it is still not true that the money appropriated to them is necessarily given to the Lord, any more than the money appropriated to the preaching of the gospel at home. Granting to the pulpit all the power and influence which its friends assert, it is still not true that money appropriated to its support is any more, necessarily, given to the Lord than the money which supports the family. Of every dollar and every cent not spent for an evil purpose, and wasted to no purpose, one may be given to the Lord just as much as another – no more, and no less. “The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof.” There is no reason to suppose that he has any pet schemes or any favorite persons. He is simply full of good-will to men; and, wherever man spends money for the benefit of man, he is casting it into the treasury of the Lord. My Irish washerwoman, who is carefully hoarding the few dollars earned by her unremitting labors, and coaxing her hens to superhuman efforts in the way of eggs, that she may make up a certain sum for the savings bank at the beginning of the quarter, for the future education and respectability of her child, is casting her money into the treasury of the Lord just as truly as the rich men who are giving their thousands, and the poor widows who are giving their mites, to the American Board. The man who buys a picture to encourage a struggling artist; the woman who buys a silk gown, that she may be dressed in a manner becoming her position; the girl who adorns her hair with a red rose, that she may be pleasing in the eyes of her lover; the lover who would fain choose the fairest ring out of the jeweller's case to express his delight in her who is wholly fair – they are all giving their money to the Lord. Whatever it is right to do with money, that is an offering unto the Lord. The woman may be extravagant, the man may be dishonest; but whoever is spending money as it is right for him to spend it, he is casting it into the treasury of the Lord.

God is no tax-gatherer, demanding a tenth part of our income or property, and letting us enjoy the rest ourselves. He does not stand in the way, taking toil of all who pass through his world. The whole world is his; and the whole world is ours. He giveth us richly all things to enjoy; and he enjoys what we enjoy. So far as our missionary effort is benevolent, he, no doubt, is pleased with it. If reason and revelation teach us any thing, they teach us that he, also, enjoys the father's pleasure in carrying home a doll to his little girl, a hoop to his little boy. He is pleased at the housewife's pleasure in her tidy home, at the frugal man's satisfaction in his accumulating wealth, at the energetic man's success in great enterprises, at the poet's happiness in friendly appreciation and worldwide fame. In whatever is generous, self-sacrificing, beneficent, we all agree God is well pleased. But I think, also, that in whatever is innocent, agreeable, pleasant, natural, he is also pleased. Wherever men and women and children are supporting themselves, gratifying one another's tastes, bearing one another's burdens, entertaining each other, making life easy for husband, wife, or child, smoothing roughnesses, leveling stumbling-blocks, meeting annoyances quietly, or resenting offences wisely, there they are doing the Lord's work. We ourselves are the temples of the Holy Ghost; and whatever ministers to the temple of the Holy Ghost is–Corban. We are the servants and sons of the Most High God. Not one-tenth, nor five-tenths, of our income, but all our income and capital – personal property and real estate – belong to him, and are to be used to further the ends which he has in view; and those ends must be the happiness, the education, the highest spiritual life, of nations and individuals. The Lord is not in the American Board, nor in the American pulpit. He is everywhere, – in the shop, by the fireside, at the table. He is to be served by the marketing, as well as by the missions. There is no rule of tenth and tribute.  We are to judge by our own reason. We will give to the American Board such and so much as its wisdom and necessities demand of us, but on precisely the same grounds as we furnish our tables, and fill our wardrobes. I see no reason why we should ask the Master of the universe how much we shall give to the American Board, any more than we should ask him how much we shall spend upon a croquet-set, or whether we shall buy a Brussels or an ingrain carpet. He has given us abundant means to find out these things for ourselves; and he cannot be pleased to have us ask needless questions. We know, or ought to know, what our account-books say, just as well as Omniscience knows it; and, if we do not know whether the American Board is wise in its administration, Omniscience will never tell us, so long as the publication of “The Missionary Herald,” and “The Annual Report,” and the daily newspapers, is continued. A lady from the Board of the Interior urged women to give their jewels for the missionary work. The ear-rings alone, she thought, might prevent the need of retrenchment for a long time. Another lady described a scene in Turkey where this idea was put in practice. From a service with the native women there, she had carried home a handkerchief-full of jewelry given for the building of the mission-chapel. One woman gave a bracelet she had worn fifty years; and they observed that her ear-rings were also gone. “Yes,” she said, “those are for the Lord too.” The good lady who tells us the story says she felt ashamed of her own ear-rings, though they were only the little ones “John” gave her.

I do not question either the sincerity or the earnestness of the speakers or of the writer. When the heart is wholly set on any object, the mind naturally sees all things in relation to that object. The ladies who have embarked their hopes and their fortunes in missionary enterprises must look upon any failure to support them with the utmost regret and dismay. And, indeed, it would seem to the most casual observer, that failure, or even retrenchment, would not be creditable to the churches. But I cannot think we have reached the point at which gentle and affectionate ladies need be uncomfortable in wearing the ear-rings which their husbands gave them.

Nor do the ladies in question think so themselves. The shrinking possessor of the ear-rings goes naively over to the other side of the argument with the most winning unconsciousness that she has made a change of base. One peculiarity of the Rutland meeting was the evening reception given to the missionaries in the three church parlors. In one of these was spread a table covered with refreshments, and adorned with pyramids of fruits and flowers.

“Why was this waste of the ointment made?” some one asks; and the moderately bejeweled lady answers, “It was not wasted for those brave soldiers of the cross, any more than it was in olden time, on the feet of the Master. It will be told in memory of the Rutland women.” And she is as right as a trevet in this decision; but it effectually disposes of the ear-ring question.

It is not simply a matter of giving ear-rings: it is one that concerns the whole structure of society. If we are to devote our ear-rings to the American Board, we must wholly and radically re-organize our mode of life. There is only one principle on which these ornaments are due to that organization; and that is, that we have no personal right to any thing more than the necessaries of life, until all the rest of the world is supplied with the necessaries of life. If this is Christianity, we are bound to put it immediately and forever into practice. If we are not bound to put it immediately and completely into practice, it is not Christianity.

What would it involve? As there are thousands, and tens of thousands, of persons at this moment in the world, with physical needs unsupplied, and hundreds of thousands with spiritual wants unprovided for, we should sacrifice, not our ear-rings alone, but our silk gowns and our broadcloth coats, our carpets and china, and most of our curtains and sofas and chairs and silver. It means, for clergymen, shirts of the coarsest unbleached cotton, and, for their wives, gowns of linsey-woolsey. It means, in short, the relinquishment of nearly every thing that marks refinement of tastes or habits, or culture in art and science. It means a return to the roughest and most primitive form of social and family life. There is no reason why the lady should give up her ear-rings, that does not apply with equal force to her reverend husband's sleeve-buttons; and even then the “refreshments” of those Rutland parlors should, to use a classical phrase, have stuck in their throats.

Religious Beggary

In the Protestant Church we have abolished priesthood; but mendicancy, prevented from concentrating itself in a single order, has become diffused through all orders. It is not strange that the lay mind becomes confused when clerical views are vague. “If golde ruste, what shulde iren do?” The laborer, whether clergyman or farmer, is worthy of his hire; but the clergyman and the farmer stand on entirely different grounds. The farmer sells a bushel of potatoes, a ton of hay, and receives the price agreed on; and that is the end of the matter. The clergyman receives his stipulated one, two, five, thousand dollars a year, but is never let alone. Somebody, generally a woman, is evermore perambulating the parish, gathering dimes and dollars to buy the minister's wife a set of furs, or himself a silk gown, or a carpet for their parlor, or, in a general way, to make them a present, or get up a surprise-donation-party, till ministers have lost somewhat of manhood. Something sturdy, self-reliant, independent, upright, and downright, has gone out of the profession. Ministers will permit, will even invite, what other men would resent. The merchant in a city, the shoemaker in a country village, would feel disgraced by a contribution-paper going about town to collect money to buy himself a coat. The lawyer's wife would rather wear calico all her life than levy tribute on the parish for a silk. But the minister and the minister's wife will wear the contributed clothes, and make a note of it for the religious newspaper. The school-teacher surveys his district, builds or buys such a house as he can, and, if not able to do either, rents a tenement, or boards, and betters himself as soon as possible. Ministers are willing to be accounted a feeble folk, for whom houses should be provided, without responsibility of their own; and this unmanly self-surrender loses its sting by christening the house a parsonage. The carpenter who wants to take his wife on a summer-trip to the White Mountains waits till he has earned enough to do so at his own expense; but some rich deacon, or “active brother,” is expected to take the minister, and pay the bills. And the minister not only suffers these things, but takes pleasure in them that do them, and sometimes feel aggrieved if they are not done; and sends a note to the religious newspapers, suggesting or affirming that they should be done. A minister of aesthetic tendencies has his rooms frescoed by a painter who has recently joined his congregation. After waiting a reasonable time, the painter sends in his bill. The clergyman returns an injured-innocence sort of note, saying that he had not expected to be called upon to pay; but he will settle the bill as soon as he can, though not immediately, as he shall have to save the money out of his salary. The painter, being a gentleman, immediately sends him a receipted bill; and the minister, being a minister, accepts it. But upon what ground should he expect to be frescoed for nothing? Why is it a grievance for a minister to pay his bills out of his salary? What else is his salary for? The blacksmith never asks his neighbor the mason to give him money to buy his wife trinkets, or to treat him to a pleasure excursion. Why is it better manners for the minister? The little boy is taught that it is very impolite to go to a companion's house, and ask, or even hint, for plumcake. Why is it polite for his father to ask in the religious newspaper, or hint in any way, that his companion should join hand in hand to give him the plumcake that his soul longs for? But the religious newspapers blossom with hints and downright exhortations to parishes to make presents to their ministers, to take them on journeys, to pay their expenses to national councils. There is often a certain space devoted to a record of the presents thus made; for indelicacy has come to such a pass, that donors do not sometimes neglect to stipulate with the donee, that their donations shall be given the publicity of print; and, on the side of the clergy, the argument is unblushingly used, that the facts are bruited for the sake of stirring up other parishes to make similar presents to their pastors. The resources of ingenuity are exhausted in devising pleasant and playful metaphors to describe the presentation; and sometimes the statement is as formal and crisp as an advertisement. Donation-parties are occasionally made the object of a little gentle satire; but it is not because they are donation-parties, but because the donations are not big enough. “According to the ecclesiastical almanac,” says a religious paper, “now is the time for ministers to ‘look out for donation-parties;’ which, in the words of one of their number, ‘are cheerful gatherings, when a clergyman's flock overwhelm him with bead watch-pockets, and eat up about one hundred and twelve dollars’ worth of his winter provisions.”

Here is a good text for the religious journal. An excellent sermon could be preached upon donation-parties in general – the evils from which they spring, the evils which they engender, and the propriety of their discontinuance. But the religious journal only draws the very mild moral “Nevertheless, a good donation-party is a good thing. Try it, flocks, and let the ministers see.” It is not that flocks break into the parsonage with their cumbrous fleece: it is that they only rub up against it, leaving bits of stray wool. If they would shear close enough, there would be no fault found. Indeed, the amount of fleece left is getting to be the measure of grace received. I read in a missionary report, that “Our associates, Mr. and Mrs. S., are meeting with great success among the natives of N. During the seven weeks we were absent, they received more presents from our people than I had for eight years. And Mr. S. had made such progress in the language, that he occupied the pulpit three Sabbaths, discoursing in the native language. This is a most hopeful beginning for the missionary work.” Most hopeful indeed. “Rev. A.B.C. and wife,” we are told, “were favored with a very pleasant visit and valuable gifts from his people, on the tenth anniversary of his marriage. Great harmony prevails; and a gracious outpouring of the Spirit has been enjoyed.”

Grace and greenbacks are the two horns of the altar. A “precious revival,” and “a purse of money and other gifts, amounting in value to seventy-five dollars,” enjoy the honors of the same paragraph. A gifted young brother preaches to the heathen in their own tongue, and draws more money out of their pockets in seven weeks than his less eloquent predecessor had done in eight years. The power of the gospel is seen in a whole parish's coming together in the vestry to present the minister's wife with a thimble, and the minister himself with a gold-headed cane – as if the kingdom of heaven were to be taken by violence. The number of young converts gathered into the church, and the market-value of the beef and cheese contributed by the old converts, are reported with equal precision; and it is counted for distinguished disinterestedness, if the minister looks around upon the dried apples and salt pork left by the receding donation-tide, and exclaims, with tears in his eyes, “Not yours, but you!” 

“Let every church,” says the religious newspaper, “whether rich or poor, contribute, of such as they have, to form a fund to enable their pastor to take such journeys as are expedient. By his attendance on the associations, conferences, and conventions, - meetings so closely allied to the best interests of the Church,– he will be so stimulated and refreshed, that the enriching which his people have bestowed on him will be returned to them fourfold. This fund may be called ‘The People's Relief-Fund,’ or ‘The Minister's Traveling-Fund.’ Let the people try this; and, certain it is, that they will be relieved of a dull minister.” 

They will be relieved of him while he is gone to his county conference; but they will be surprised to find how short the time seems before he is back on their hands again. To hire a dull minister, and then hire him to go away, is burning your candle at both ends. Would it not be cheaper to hire a bright one in the beginning? The notion that a dull minister is to be sharpened up by conferences and conventions is preposterous. They are far more likely to fritter away an able man's power. Doubtless, for certain purposes and to a certain extent, conference is useful; but the multiplication, in our day, of associations and consociations, of convention and council is any thing but conducive to intellectual or moral vigor. No doubt suggestions are sometimes made, and thoughts elucidated; but we are oftener reminded of Mr. Weller and the alphabet, and ask, “Is it worth while to go through so much to get so little?” Any thing like a mental shock is studiously avoided. The questions which are really questions are left outside, or represented only by persons of our own faith; and what is admitted is that which is, in the main, universally assumed. Our National Council in Boston may have been greatly productive of good fellowship and good feeling, and, so far, a good thing; but as an exponent of religious belief, as a simplifier of theological creed, as an organism of faith or polity, did not the mountain bring forth a mouse? The great object of the council seemed to be to keep hands off. The great aim was, how not to do it. But why come up from the ends of the earth to declare our adherence to the articles which our fathers set forth or re-affirmed? That goes without saying. Life and thought have changed since the days of our fathers; and, if we want to know any thing, it is how we stand affected by this change. To say that we are not affected at all is to say that we have a name to live, and are dead.

The chances are, that the association, the conference, the convention, will travel around in the same orbit, and on the same plane, as the dull minister. He will be stimulated and refreshed to pursue, upon his return, the precise path which has already led him to failure. If the People's Relief-Fund would send him to a political caucus, to the gaming-tables of Hamburg, to the Derby Races, to the Louisiana legislature, to a traveling circus, to a French assembly, or a London dinner-table,– to places where men are in deadly, if wicked earnest, or places where he will be dashed out of his grooves, and into new contacts and courses,– the People's Fund might, indeed, afford relief.

But, apart from the wisdom of any mode of applying a relief-fund, why should the suggestion of a relief-fund be made? Why should the farmers and the shoemakers and the day-laborers of a poor church take their hard-earned money, and give it to their pastor, to send him anywhere? They have already paid him his salary. Why must they give him gifts? They need their surplus earnings as much as he. Their lives are more limited than his. Their wives stay at home from year's end to year's end. If they have any money to spare, let them take their own little trip, and enlarge their views to broaden horizons. If the rich merchant choose to give money to his minister, and his minister choose to take money as a gift, it is their own affair. But for an educated man to take the money of uneducated men and hard-working women, and spend it in pleasure and recreation; for religious newspapers to urge or to hint that the hard-working men and women should thus devote their money, and praise them without stint when they do thus devote it,– seems not high-minded, seems mean and mercenary.

A parsonage is a good thing in many respects. Very few ministers, perhaps, are able to buy or to build houses; and it is desirable that they should have a fixed home. If parishes should feel that the parsonage was as much a part of their responsibility as the church, that they could no more expect a minister without the one than without the other, I should not object. We should all be better, if ministers were so able that they could dictate their own terms. Whatever the parish in its own interest, from a business-point of sight, chooses to proffer, it need not be unmanly for a minister to accept. But is it manly for him to ask people to provide him a house? Is it even proper or necessary? As ministers come and go, there are very few parishes where they cannot hire a house for as long a period as they are likely to stay. Why should one man in a town be freed from the need of care and thought by the care and thought of other men? Is it that he may be the more free to pursue his spiritual calling? Come, then, the celibate clergy of the Roman Catholic Church! Let us have either one thing or another – either a celibate priesthood, without entangling alliances, wholly devoted and subject to the Church; or a man taking care of himself and his wife and children, precisely like other men.

A woman spends her prime in teaching the children of her native town at a third, or a half, or a quarter, what the minister receives; and boards in her father's house, or wherever she can find shelter. No one ever thinks of building her a house, or giving her a quitclaim deed on a single apartment in anybody's house. The person who teaches your children six hours a day for five days in the week has, apparently, a greater influence on the next generation than he who preaches to grown-up people two hours a day once a week. That person needs, just as much, freedom from material care; and, if a woman, she has immeasurably less chance for securing such exemption. But the women of a parish, who never think of providing a domicile for their townswoman, will meet at each other's houses to knit toes and heels to coarse woollen stockings, at seventy-five cents a dozen pairs, to provide a house for an able-bodied man. I should not think a man would like to live in such a house. It cannot be a pleasant thing for a man to look around upon his wainscots and windows, and reflect that a dozen or twenty women, by “working smartly,” finished a dozen pairs of stockings in three evenings, and, with the seventy-five cents therefor received, built up painfully the roof that shelters him. It is a reform against nature. If ministers will not let women preach, neither should they let them build. If they do not want women to become men, they should play the man themselves. It is certainly no more unwomanly to occupy a man's pulpit than to rear a man's house. But a woman in the pulpit sets a whole presbytery to cackling; while a woman may build a Presbyterian parsonage from turret to foundation-stone, and not a clergyman of them all will move the wing, or open the mouth, or peep.

“Who says that we have no ‘plain speaking’ in the pulpit, these days,” asks a religious newspaper, “when the Massachusetts preacher can be named who uttered the following in a recent sermon?–

“Some of the ladies of the ____ Church may say, that, if they lived in Christ's time, he should have made their house his home, nor suffered for the lack of any hospitality they could furnish. But I think he would have gone homeless for all you would have done for him. And here is why I think so: you allowed me to pay the hotel-bills of every minister who supplied the pulpit while I was in ____ a few months ago.”

If a teacher hire a substitute during his absence, does he expect the committee to pay that substitute's hotel-bills? If a treasury clerk put his brother in his place during his extra furlough, does he expect the government to pay his brother's board? Why should the church pay the hotel-bills of the substitute any more than the butcher's bills of the regular preacher? At the outset, the church agrees to pay so much salary. It is no more incumbent upon the church to entertain the preacher's guests, be they substitutes or exchanges, than it is incumbent on the minister to entertain the deacon's son-in-law, or the merchant's aunts and cousins. Yet this preacher has the profaneness, the vulgarity, the assumption, to say, that, because his church did not pay the hotel-bills of his hired man, they would have rejected Christ. The religious newspaper calls this “plain speaking:” I call it brutality. The minister who can so defile his pulpit as to use it for such purposes is not fit to be admitted to any lady's house.

Again: the same paper says it hears of a “minister, who lately astounded his congregation by reading ‘out in meeting’ an account of his receipts and expenses for the year. The only item to the credit of the richest member of his flock was ‘one apple-pie.’”

This seems but a smart joke to the reverend recorder; and, no doubt the reverend reader thought he had scored one against his congregation: but it is such things as these that lower the clergy in public estimation, and inspire the laity with disgust. Why should a minister be going over his accounts on Sunday, any more than the merchant or the banker? Why should he bring his private affairs into the great congregation, any more than the milliner or the cook? If he is dissatisfied with the bargain which he made with the people, or if they do not fulfill their part of the contract, there are places and times when it is proper for him to enforce his contract, or to secure better terms. But to take his account-book into church, to preach his groceries for the gospel, to feed his “flock” with stale bread and scanty steaks, makes his pastorate dear, even at the price of one apple-pie. 

What is the quality which suggests such a paragraph as this? “As a St. Louis preacher was leaving the church last Sunday, an appreciative parishioner slipped a hundred-dollar-note in his hand as a reward for his excellent sermon. Perhaps, if there were more such parishioners, there would be more excellent sermons."

Is it, indeed, only the voice of malice and all uncharitableness that calls ministers mercenary? I have quoted nothing from foes, only from ministers themselves. Think what a sermon is represented to be – the message of God to man by his appointed and anointed ambassador, the application of saving truth to souls sore-wounded and shot at by the archers of sin, light to them sitting in the darkness, salvation to the lost. And a man, an ambassador of heaven, will preach Christ and him crucified with more fervor and unction, if a hundred-dollar-note awaits him now and then in the pews below!

Benighted and blind leader of the blind! Thy money perish with thee, because thou hast thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money. Thou hast neither part nor lot in this matter; for thy heart is not right in the sight of God. Repent, therefore, of this thy wickedness, and pray God, if, perhaps, the thought of thine heart may be forgiven thee.

I do not join in the outcry that the clergy are mercenary. As a class, they are not mercenary. They give largely in proportion to their means. In a very large diocese of clergymen, I know not a single one who is miserly, or who is even charged with being mercenary. Yet the responsibility of the charge rests chiefly with themselves. It is because clergymen set up a standard for themselves different from the standard of other men, that they are differently judged. They are ridiculed, not for exchanging a low for a high salary, but because they insist on calling the higher salary a louder call. No one says aught against the country school-teacher who goes to the city schoolhouse, or the author who sells to the publisher that pays the best, because these are reckoned as matters of legitimate business. But the clergyman assumes that the question of salary does not enter into his profession. He is concerned only to put himself where he will do the most good. Ministers are on precisely the same ground as writers and other clergy. An author is entitled to sell his books to the highest bidder. But the author who lets the consideration of money into his writing – the author who would write better for ten dollars than he would for one dollar – the author, who, at any time and for any purpose, does less than his best, is mercenary, and unworthy to be an author. The minister may lawfully, manfully, and religiously go where he may receive the highest salary; but no consideration of salary or hundred-dollar-notes may ever slip into the fountain whence his sermon springs. And, in view of such paragraphs as this, it may be questioned whether the same public sentiment which forbids a bribe to a judge, which has taken away the moiety from internal revenue collectors, which frowns upon the fee to waiters, should not, also, investigate the system of gifts to the clergy. But, however this may be, there can be but one opinion – that it is more manly, more apostolic, more devout, to settle the question of salary in private, and in a business-like manner, than it is to disclaim pecuniary considerations because Christ had not where to lay his head, and then stand up in the pulpit to flout at hotel-bills and whine over an apple-pie.

Source: Selections from Gail Hamilton (Mary Abigail Dodge), Sermons to the Clergy (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1877).

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[1] Mary Abigail Dodge, Sermons to the Clergy (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1877), p. 120.

[2] Dodge, p. 120.

[3] Dodge, p. 122.

[4] Dodge, p. 171.