an useful and profitable member of the commonweal

Dismiss this youth from your service, madam, replied the preacher. You cannot bid me do so, said the Lady; you cannot, as a Christian and a man of humanity, bid me turn away an unprotected creature against whom my favour, my injudicious favour if you will, has reared up so many enemies.
It is not necessary you should altogether abandon him, though you dismiss him to another service, or to a calling better suiting his station and character, said the preacher; elsewhere he maybe an useful and profitable member of the commonweal — here he is but a makebate, and a stumbling-block of offence. The youth has snatches of sense and of intelligence, though he lacks industry. I will myself give him letters commendatory to Olearius Schinderhausen, a learned professor at the famous university of Leyden, where they lack an under-janitor — where, besides gratis instruction, if God give him the grace to seek it, he will enjoy five merks by the year, and the professor’s cast-off suit, which he disparts with biennially.
This will never do, good Mr. Warden, said the Lady, scarce able to suppress a smile; we will think more at large upon this matter. In the meanwhile, I trust to your remonstrances with this wild boy and with the family, for restraining these violent and unseemly jealousies and bursts of passion; and I entreat you to press on him and them their duty in this respect towards God, and towards their master.
You shall be obeyed, madam, said Warden. On the next Thursday I exhort the family, and will, with God’s blessing, so wrestle with the demon of wrath and violence, which hath entered into my little flock, that I trust to hound the wolf out of the fold, as if he were chased away with bandogs.
This was the part of the conference from which Mr. Warden derived the greatest pleasure. The pulpit was at that time the same powerful engine for affecting popular feeling which the press has since become, and he had been no unsuccessful preacher, as we have already seen. It followed as a natural consequence, that he rather over-estimated the powers of his own oratory, and, like some of his brethren about the period, was glad of an opportunity to handle any matters of importance, whether public or private, the discussion of which could be dragged into his discourse. In that rude age the delicacy was unknown which prescribed time and place to personal exhortations; and as the court-preacher often addressed the King individually, and dictated to him the conduct he ought to observe in matters of state, so the nobleman himself, or any of his retainers, were, in the chapel of the feudal castle, often incensed or appalled, as the case might be, by the discussion of their private faults in the evening exercise, and by spiritual censures directed against them, specifically, personally, and by name. The sermon, by means of which Henry Warden purposed to restore concord and good order to the Castle of Avenel, bore for text the well-known words, He who striketh with the sword shall perish by the sword,  and was a singular mixture of good sense and powerful oratory with pedantry and bad taste.