We admire long pastorates when it is agreeable to both parties, we know ministers who boast they have been thirty years in one place, though all the world knows they have been there twenty-nine years too long.

Their congregations are patiently waiting their removal to a higher latitude.

Meanwhile, those churches are like a man with chronic rheumatism, very quiet--not because they admire rheumatism, but because there is no use kicking with a swollen foot, since it would hurt them more than the object assaulted.
If a pastorate can be maintained only through conflict or ecclesiastical tyranny, it might better be abandoned.

There are many ministers who go away from their settlements before they ought, but we think there are quite as many who do not go soon enough.

A husband might just as well try to keep his wife by choking her to death with a marriage ring as a minister to try to keep a church's love by ecclesiastical violence.