Seite:Marsh Hallig 1856.djvu/232

232THE HALLIG.

hopes, to find himself in a situation where not only
man is poor, but nature herself is more desolate than
the barren heath, to be banished to such a waste, desti-
tute of every source of knowledge, of every intellectual
refreshment, condemned to servile labor, a mere keeper
of sheep ? Has he tried what it is to support a family
on such a slender salary, earned in such a way, and
then to see a threatened death in every inundation, and
to know that if his wife and children survive him, they
must be left as beggars to the charity of the world ?
Ask him, on his conscience, if, under such circum-
stances, he should still have been the man you so much
praise ? Ask him whether he could have remained true
to himself for years — and many a hallig pastor never
leaves his sea-girt turf during his whole life — if he
could have preserved that spirit which is satisfied with
an inward reward, with the consciousness that his
labors are blessed and which, therefore, sustains the
mind and heart under such external disadvantages ?
  The writer of these pages is not ashamed to confess
that during the early years of his ministry, he was him-
self a hallig priest — as the clergymen on these islands
are called, and not unfrequently in scorn — and perhaps
would have been so. still, had it not been found impossi-
ble to rebuild his little church after it had been swept
away for the second time ; and he has wished to say a
few earnest words in defense of his early fellow-laborers,
to those who regard them with contempt. These words
will bring them no fruit, will prompt no hand to collect
a fund to provide even for their intellectual necessities,
and without which provision the most thinking and
learned young clergyman can make no advances in