IN TWO PEWS | AdventAI

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Jun 2, 1881

IN TWO PEWS.

It was a strange minister preached that day. Parson Beers was old and almost worn out. He had resigned for the rest of his life, and the church in Eltham was candidating. This present “sample” was a young man, full of the enthusiasm and faith of youth, and his words were like messages of fire compared to the weary utterances of doctrine that Parson Beers dealt in. The text was that word of Christ, “By their fruits shall ye know them,” and the preacher began by simply restating this fact in the terms and illustrations of every-day life. When he had fairly brought it home to the minds of his hearers that no one of them was so practically silly as to expect to gather good grapes from a wild frost-grape vine, or the best kinds of edible apples from the thorny seedlings of the wayside, he turned the facts back on their experience.

“And yet, my dear friends, you use your common sense so little in matters of religion that you say from day to day among yourselves: ‘How stingy that woman is! How close she holds her money! How she grudges wages to those who work for her, and counts every penny she has to pay out for honest work. But she is a real Christian. She subscribes to missions and attends all the prayer-meetings.’

“What do you think of Christ? Is that his image and superscription? No! As far as the Heaven is from the earth, so far is he above such so-called Christianity. It is not his. He who exhorts that we should do unto others as we would that others should do unto us owns no such discipleship. Loving and giving are the fruit of his example, not fault-finding and with-holding. You do not gather this sour and bitter fruit from the branches of the true Vine. Or, again, you say: ‘That man is a hard man in his family; harsh to his children. They do not love or obey him except from fear of his heavy hand or bitter tongue. His wife is almost dead with hard work. He never considers her comfort or convenience. But he is the most orthodox man in the church; he exhorts in meeting, prays like a prophet, and is the most searching examiner of converts we have ever had here. No flaw in doctrine is permitted to pass. We rely on him as one of our pillars.’ Is this the result of religion? Is it the outgrowth of a following of Him who pitieth his children; who comforts us as one whom his mother comforteth; who gave himself to die for the church, and leaves to us this exhortation, ‘Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church’? Or, you are yourself a selfish man or woman. You go about your daily business and let the world go about theirs. It is not you who visit the sick, feed the poor, clothe the naked. You have too much to do at home. There are your clothes to make, your business to see to, your children to dress, your investments to look after. No one finds in your house a place of rest or refreshing. Your children do not love to come home when they once escape from the nest. You have few friends, and they are not warm ones. You know well that if you were to die to-morrow you could count on the fingers of one hand those who would mourn for you; but you belong to the church, you sit at the Lord's table, and you expect to go to Heaven.

“My friends, I ask the question in all solemnity, What are you going to do there? Heaven is not a place where selfishness can breathe. The air is too pure, the surroundings too exalted. It will not be your ‘own place.’ Stop, and hear me say, with the authority of my Master, You are not Christians! If religion means anything (and I thank God it means everything to the heart that honestly receives it) it means a life of godliness, a life of love to man and obedience to God, a light that shines, a vine that bears good grapes, a city set on a hill. When men say, ‘If this man is a Christian, then there is nothing good in religion,’ and say it of you (as I have heard it said about hundreds of nominal Christians), it shows that your religion is vain, and I counsel you with the counsel of Him who sent me, to stop in your course at once, repent, believe, and practice, for neither repentance nor faith are genuine without they bear fruit in works, and the hope of the hypocrite shall perish, even though he rely on it to the end.”

Much more the minister said, to the same purpose, and said it with all the impressiveness that a feeling voice and earnest manner can give to speech.

Mrs. Marsh, who sat full in front of the pulpit was much interested in the novelty of his style and his fluent utterance, and complacently listened to every word. She was a woman of good position in the town, well-dressed, and a member of the church; and she thought of all this with satisfaction as the sermon went on, but rather as a side issue. She applied every pungent sentence, every close application to Mrs. Tucker, in the next slip, who was really Mordecai in the gate to Mrs. Marsh.

“I wonder how she likes that!” murmured the occupant of the front pew, to herself. “She thinks she is real smart, and she looks down on me, I know; but I guess she ain't any better Christian than other folks. She never comes to sewing society, and if that isn't ‘clothing the naked,’ I don't know what is. And she's awfully selfish. I never knew of her sending Mrs. Clark a mite of anything nice all these years she's been sick. I hope she's takin' of it to heart.”

Mrs. Marsh happened to be as good an illustration of the preacher's last supposed case as could be found in the congregation. She was a woman who made religion unlovely wherever she went. Positive, selfish, jealous, she lived in the narrow circle of her small family, devoting her time to herself and her boys, as far as they could occupy it, and the rest of her hours were given to other duties.

Her husband was a fact, but not an object of special attention; his clothes were never cared for, never cleaned, mended, or made to look “Amaist as weel's new” by thoughtful attention. Little Fred and Conrad were dressed in all the velvet and embroidery their mother's facile fingers could devise, and her own clothes were marvels of finery; home-made, it is true, and of poor material, but still fine. Her husband's ragged button-holes and undarned coats made painful contrast; but she thought they were “good enough for him.”

She was not a woman whom anybody loved beyond her own immediate family; yet she was jealous of every other woman who had many or warm friends, and attributed it to deceit, or policy, or superior fortune, rather than to any real reason. She was not an educated woman, and her ignorance of life, either through books or from experience, warped her outlook, no doubt. She was industrious, and to a certain extent kind-hearted; but her life, as it grew narrower, made her as narrow too. She, indeed, might have counted on half the fingers of one hand those who would mourn her loss, and her husband had long ago come to the conclusion that a Christian profession did not mean anything better than a life of decency, without religion. He was an honest, kindly man, and conscientiously did what he thought he ought to do in his business and toward his family; but he was not a Christian. He had no inward love for God's character or works; he had no trust in Christ as his Saviour; he never read the Bible or prayed. His wife did these things, and was no more lovely or kindly for their doing. She had not half the friends the husband had, and she made clamorous complaint about it. Is it strange that the unexpected thought of his heart was: “If Ann is a Christian, why, I don't care to be one. It isn't much of a gain on the ordinary sort of folks, after all.”

The boys, too, alternately indulged and punished, scolded and kissed, learned to have little respect for the parent who slapped them, when she was angry, for the smallest transgression, and laughed at much worse faults when she was in good humor. Her cross words and loud remonstrances fell on their ears after a while much like the clatter of a machine that nobody in its vicinity notices till it stops. Such was Mrs. Marsh.

Mrs. Tucker, in the next pew, was her antithesis. The daughter of the old clergyman of Eltham, Annie Beers, had received a thorough education, and her mother, a gentle lady, whose ancestors had been clergymen for two or three generations, had trained her only child in the delicate, gentle ways of her own home. Annie had married early the pastor of a church in the city, and moved in refined society as long as her husband lived. After his death she came home, with her two little girls, and set herself down in this country town, to do her duty as well as she knew how. Cultivated and refined, she excited Mrs. Marsh's domineering nature by her quiet self-respect and the natural superiority which made the elder and coarser woman unwillingly conscious of her own shortcomings. She almost hated Mrs. Tucker, simply for her good manners, her tasteful dress, her pleasant voice, and grammatical conversation; and it was her delight to complain of the sweet woman's pride, to sneer at her ways of thought and life, and to “fetch her down a peg,” as she termed it, on occasion.

Now Mrs. Tucker was a real, humble, Christian woman, and she had heard the Sunday's sermon with a deep sense of her own shortcomings. She did not think of Mrs. Marsh, or apply the words of the preacher to her neighbors, though there were many about her who were the very models of his illustrations. She fixed her inward eyes upon herself, and owned to the ear she knew could hear even a thought, that she had not done what she could to glorify Him. She confessed that she had been a little too proud to enjoy the church societies, and, not being confident of their usefulness, had staid away, instead of attending them and trying to improve them. She owned, too, that she had neglected her sick neighbors who were rich, and sent the delicacies she knew well how to prepare and the small luxuries, so grateful to invalids, all to the poor, forgetting that she owed an equal care to all in any sort of need, whether of flesh or spirit. Moreover, there were certain people, even some members of the church, whom she knew did not like her. What had she done to dim the light of Christ? She was conscious that Mrs. Marsh had an aversion to her. Why was it? Had she not been civil or friendly? She could not have sympathy of the ordinary sort with a woman who was so radically different from her, and she felt, sorrowfully, that her tastes revolted from intercourse with so coarse a nature with so little education; but she resolved to try to do better—to be more self-denying, less exclusive to bring even her tastes and peculiarities of nature into subjection to Him whose sublime reproach it was that the common people heard him gladly, and that he ate and drank with publicans and sinners. Her resolutions were not of the fruitless sort, for they abided in the true Vine and shared its divine vitality; but she did not blazon them, preferring to live, rather than to talk. The next sewing-circle met at Mrs. Marsh's house, and, to her surprise, Mrs. Tucker was one of the first arrivals. Just then the few who had come before her were busy getting on a quilt, and, absorbed in the operation, the hostess had no time for any special greeting; but when the quilters were gathered about the frame and the rest of the society busy at other work Mrs. Marsh's coarse voice intruded itself on every ear.

“Well, Mis' Tucker, it's a sight to behold to see you to sewin'-circle. I guess the sermon Sunday sort of fetched you. Didn't it?”

Mrs. Tucker's delicate face colored and her soft eyes flashed; but she said, gently, half smiling: “I think it did.”

“Well,” went on Mrs. Marsh, “'twas a most a splendid discourse. I enjoyed it ever so much; and as I sat there listenin', thinks me: I guess that hits all 'round, and I thought you looked as though it went home to you.”

“It did,” said Mrs. Tucker; but something in the dimmed eyes or the tone of voice conveyed more than she said.

“Well, 'twas searchin', no doubt. You don't mind my sayin' so, I suppose. I mean well.”

Mrs. Tucker smiled. She did not speak, but Dosiah Burt, a keen and outspoken old maid, had her word to utter.

“When I lived to Hartford, and 'tended Dr. Bushnell's church, he used to say: ‘My friends, don't hear my sermons for those in the next pew. I mean it for you, yourselves.’”

A general silence fell on the sewing-circle.

Desiah's arrow had hit the mark. Mrs. Marsh turned away without a sign of having heard her, and left the room to get her supper-table ready; and Mrs. Deacon Green, whose Sunday-school class had vexed her righteous but rather illiterate soul, the last time they met, by insisting on an explanation of the text, “To the one we are the savor of death unto death and to the other the savor of life unto life,” thought she understood now what it meant. Perhaps she did; but even Paul wound up with, “And who is sufficient for these things?” And, after all, people in that very church still continue, up to the present speaking, to hear for their neighbors in the next pew; and perhaps they will so long as Eltham continues to be inhabited by poor humanity. Dear reader, do you live there?—Independent.