Living With Ben | AdventAI

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Apr 3, 1879

Living With Ben.

"I CAN'T be a Christian and live with Ben," Mrs. Moore said it. And Ben was her husband.

She told her minister so; and the next Sunday he preached about it. That was our old minister, Father P——, who had been settled over the parish twenty-seven years. He used to preach right at us, not over our heads. He never shot at random; he never wasted any of his arrows; they all went straight home to the mark—they hit. When he came round calling on us in the week, if he heard us complain that Brother A. or Sister B. did not do as they ought to, he came down upon us the next Sunday. He did not allude to Brother A. or Sister B. though. Not a word about their shortcomings; but he took us on Christian charity and forbearance, and made very plain to us the beam in our own eyes.

On this occasion he might just as well have said: "My hearers, my subject this morning is living with Ben Moore; the impossibility for a Christian to do it."

Mrs. Moore was a kind of intermittent Christian. Or as one of the deacons said, she "did not seem to be converted all through." She seemed to think that religion was something that belonged with Sundays and prayer-meetings; something too spiritual for every day. It did not appear to occur to her that her life ought to be regulated by it; that there was a principle in it, which was able to keep her steadfast. It was a state of mind, an experience, which came and then was all over with, as a dream is. When she was in meetings, and was with Christian people, and when nothing especially crossed her, she "enjoyed her mind," as she called it; and nobody doubted that she did try to live a Christian life.

But her "thorn in the flesh" was Ben. He had an irritable temper; and she never appeared to think that it was a part of her discipline to bear it. He was often absent for many weeks at a time on business; and then she was a good Christian, consistent, cheerful, contented. But when he came home, she said she "fell from grace;" and if she had not once had clear evidence to that effect, she should be afraid she never had been converted at all.

He found fault, and she retorted; and they had some bitter experiences of recrimination, till neither of them had any respect for her character as a Christian; which was the saddest part of all to her, for somewhere in the woman's consciousness was a feeling, which at times amounted to a conviction that she truly had repented of her sins and accepted Christ; and she would not for the world have been shut out from her hope in him.

"And oh!" she said to Father P——, "if I were differently situated I think I could live a consistent life. But I can't be a Christian and live with Ben."

So the dear old man preached about it. He had a homely, direct way; and the first thing he said was: "We have among us some of the old-fashioned kind of saints, who speak about how they 'got religion.' And nobody doubts but they did get it. But what was it? What do they mean by it? They are in possession of something, which has not only given them great comfort and support all the way along, but has made them better than they were before. A woman may have a hope in Christ, and still not be any more lovable for it; a man may have faith enough to save him and yet be no kinder, no more considerate; but in such a case, religion is not doing its work.

"And the excuse of some, that they have many provocations, that they are in a hard place, is of no avail. Is it any merit to be amiable where there is nothing to hinder? There are families in which it is so easy to be good, that it would be proof of utter depravity not to be. In the homes where all are Christians, there are so many mutual helps that the members fail of some of the strongest tests of their Christian life, and likewise of some of its deepest and richest experiences. And I apprehend that our Saviour watches with a more tender solicitude the sorely-tried ones whom he has set solitary in irreligious households."

And he went on to say: "I have failed in one of the most vital points in my ministry, if I have failed to make it plain to my people that the spiritual cannot be a separate thing from the natural life; the two must go along together; they must be incorporated till the diviner element, working all through the other, like the leaven, shall be constantly making us more and more like him into whose image we shall one day be changed.—Congregationalist.