“I am seventy-five years old; I have hardly had any illness all my life; I have done a deal of work, and God has been very good to me, and I am not going to grumble at Him now for shutting me up a few months.”
“Your wife tells me you cannot read much, on account of your eyes; I suppose you find the time a little tedious after the active life you have led?”
“I shouldn’t find the time tedious at all, if we were only left to ourselves.” I looked to the wife for an explanation, and she said, “He means, ma’am, that the neighbours hereabout annoy him so by their ways of going on.” This touched a theme upon which he could be eloquent. He began to tell me a great deal about the wickedness of his neighbours; their desecration of the Sabbath seemed to vex him exceedingly. He complained that he could get no peace on the Sunday for the cries of those who went about selling things; while the swarms of children that came out to spend their halfpence that day shewed how wicked their parents must be. As I generally avoid talking of the faults of other persons when visiting the poor, I said, wishing to change the subject, “Well, we have so much to do with ourselves that we must not judge our neighbours harshly.” The old man looked indignantly at me, and exclaimed, “Do you think if God was to call me away this instant, and I had to go to be judged before His throne, and He was to tell me of all the wicked ways I have seen going on before my eyes, and He was to say to me, ‘Why did you see all that sin, and not reprove it?’ do you think He’d take for excuse my saying, ‘that I oughtn’t to judge my neighbours harshly?’ No; depend upon it, He’d hold me guilty for it. He’d say, ‘You know’d better, and you ought to have cared for their souls, and told ’em of it.’ I have always been in the habit of reproving sin when I have seen it, and I always shall.”
The character of Nehemiah came so forcibly into my mind while he was speaking, that when he had ended I could not help remarking, “If you had lived in the days of Nehemiah, I suppose you would not have disapproved of what he did? You know, he not only reproved the people, but he smote certain of them, and plucked out their hair.”
“Ah!” said the old man, “he was in the right of it. Whenever I reads that, I always says, ‘Sarved ’em right.’ We want Nehemiahs bad enough now-a-days,—people, I mean, as has got the courage to call things by their right names.”
“But,” I replied, “we have a later example than Nehemiah to go by, and a more perfect one. Jesus did not reprove sin in this way.”—“He made a whip of small cords and drove them all out of the temple, I know,” said the old man.—“So He did once,” I said; “but a whip of small cords in the hands of Jesus is a very different thing from what it would be in our hands.”—“I don’t understand you,” was the rejoinder.—I explained, “Jesus would only use it where and when it ought to be used, because He would know the extent of the evil in every heart He had to do with; but we, who can judge only after the outward appearance, might make mistakes, and inflict a wound where we ought rather to have bound one up.”
He was silent a minute, and then, as if unable to keep in any longer what had evidently been in his thoughts throughout, he said, “Ma’am, I’ve often heard from my old ’ooman and the rest of ’em what you says to ’em at the meetings, and it has been upon my mind, when I did see you, to tell you I think, if you know’d more about some of ’em you get there, you would be rather more sharp upon ’em than you are.”
“You mean, I suppose, that when I know of anything particularly wrong in any of them, I ought to reprove them?”
“Why, yes. You see, they look up to you a good deal; and, it seems to me, you might do a power of good this way.”
“I think you do not take quite the right view of my position. I do not profess to come amongst them as a reprover of sin, and just to preach to them about their duties; I really have no right to take such an office on myself. I want to help them, knowing that many of their mistakes arise from ignorance. Most of them come in after a hard day’s work, and much suffering in body and mind from fatigue and anxiety; and while I know much of that fatigue and anxiety might have been prevented, if they had set about things in a right way instead of a wrong one, I feel the best use I can make of the little time we have together is, to try to shew them ‘a better way.’ We always begin with reading God’s holy Word, and that is the best reprover of sin; for Paul says, you know, ‘I had not known sin, except by the law.’ It was the law that made sin appear to him ‘exceeding sinful;’ and that is the effect I hope and pray it may have upon us.”