it _did_ travel or _could_ travel under that law and that practice
which furnished the pleas for complaint. Now, it was upon these
'objections,' as may well be supposed, that the main battle arose.
Simply to want the 'call,' being a mere _zero_, could not much lay
hold upon public feeling. It was a case not fitted for effect. You
cannot bring a blank privation strongly before the public eye. 'The
"call" did not take place last week;' well, perhaps it will take place
next week. Or again, if it should never take place, perhaps it may be
religious carelessness on the part of the parish. Many parishes
notoriously feel no interest in their pastor, except as a quiet member
of their community. Consequently, in two of three cases that might
occur, there was nothing to excite the public; the parish had either
agreed with the patron, or had not noticeably dissented. But in the
third case of positive 'objections,' which (in order to justify
themselves as not frivolous and vexatious) were urged with peculiar
emphasis, the attention of all men was arrested. Newspapers reverberated
the fact: sympathetic groans arose: the patron was an oppressor: the
parish was under persecution: and the poor clergyman, whose case was
the most to be pitied, as being in a measure _endowed_ with a lasting
fund of dislike, had the mortification to find, over and above this
resistance from within, that he bore the name of 'intruder' from
without. He was supposed by the fiction of the case to be in league
with his patron for the persecution of a godly parish; whilst in reality
the godly parish was persecuting _him_, and hallooing the world _ab
extra_ to join in the hunt.

In such cases of pretended objections to men who have not been tried,
we need scarcely tell the reader, that usually they are mere cabals
and worldly intrigues. It is next to impossible that any parish or
congregation should sincerely agree in their opinion of a clergyman.