Chapter Four
As with the monthly posts, the italicized sections are what I'm unsure about:
There were still two other priests invited to Rodenburg for the trial sermon, who also pleased. But the first mayor spoke out for the choice of Hans Warsow with resoluteness,
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and because he had an influence in the city like no one else before him, so would it be carried out with considerable consensus. Now Hans Warsaw had achieved his goal; he had a great vicarage in the middle of a thriving city that lay in the heart of his beloved home: he could work and be active.
And he did it. His job was not easy. His predecessor, an older, sicker gentleman, had left the larger part of the work to his younger colleague, and Deacon Brettschneider had created a rich field for himself in the congregation. But Hans Warsow was in a better position than all his colleagues: his sermons had a strong attraction that increased church attendance. People who were usually never seen in the church now appeared; one spoke of his sermons, which had never happened in Rodenburg until now. But all that, as beautifully as it started, lasted only a short time. The interest in his sermons certainly did not stop, but still lost its liveliness, as the novelty value there and his job was a little bit familiar. Moreover, because his character changed that balance that let itself bring neither through obtrusiveness nor through affectation of many of his feminine [Schutzbefohlenen] out of the composure, because as a thinker he was too often occupied with all kinds of questions and contemplations, in order to come to meet every visitor, every one of his congregation members on the street alike with every ready kindness, whom one now wanted of "his" priests, so maintained the public interest that he had excited in the beginning, not on his peak.
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"Certainly, he's clever, and what he says is beautiful," opined a lady of the better circles, who at first built doors for him with an enthusiastic hand, "but I can't help myself: Mr. Brettschneider is so very much nicer; it all comes out from him so sincerely and so lovingly." "He's earned himself a little bit of credit. The intellectual people are always like that," voiced an-other, with whom he had a very stimulating conversation at a baptismal party, but whom at a later occasion he had not recognized and consequently had paid little attention to.
"He can do sermons, but he can't comfort!" said a more modest old woman, who had taken offense to the new priest, that after a half-hour complaint of all of her grief in succession he was not more completely with the concern. Taken by the amount, a kindly disposition has a far better effect than intellectual merits; these shut out, that draws in. Hans Warsow was still innocent enough to believe that in life, it depended first on a serious will and the strength of ability. The people want to be caressed; the look must be warm, and that hand that touches them must be soft. And Hans Warsow's look was not always warm, and the hand that he offered not always soft. For all that, he wasn't allowed to complain: a very big part, not only of the St. Nikolaus congregation, but also of the whole city, stood by him indefatigably. He gave priority to his sermons above everything else; he searched it for its official acts. He tried hard to come into a personal and social intercourse with it. This was, of course, not easy because during the day he workt in the community, and his evenings were devoted to intellectual studies that he
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did not neglect at all, or he was occupied with the preparation for the second edition of his work about East Prussia, which had met with a growing approval in the province and even beyond it.
