"Well, perhaps I will join you after you adopt my creed, to use no animal food. Your head will be clearer for running your sect, and such respect for your stomach will show more religion than a long beard does."
"My constitution would not withstand that sort of a diet; it would undermine my health."
"Temperance in eating and drinking never undermined any body's constitution," retorted Benjamin. "You will live twenty years longer to practise it, and possess a much larger per cent, of self-respect."
"Perhaps I will try it, if you will; and also, if you will adopt my creed, and go for a new sect."
"I am ready to join you any time in discarding animal food; and, if you succeed well, then I will talk with you about the rest of it."
"Agreed," responded Keimer, thinking that Benjamin was really inclined to embrace his scheme, whereas he was only laying his plans for sport. He knew that a man, who liked a good meal as well as Keimer did, would have a hard time on the diet he proposed. Referring to it in his "Autobiography" he said:
"He was usually a great eater, and I wished to give myself some diversion in half-starving him. He consented to try the practice, if I would keep him company. I did so, and we held it for three months. Our provisions were purchased, cooked, and brought to us regularly by a woman in the neighborhood, who had from me a list of forty dishes, which she prepared for us at different times, in which there entered neither fish, flesh, nor fowl. This whim suited me the better at this time from the cheapness of it,—not costing us above eighteen pence sterling each per week. I have since kept several lents most strictly, leaving the common diet for that, and that for the common, abruptly, without the least inconvenience. So that, I think, there is little in the advice of making those changes by easy gradations. I went on pleasantly, but poor Keimer suffered grievously, grew tired of the project, longed for the flesh pots of Egypt, and ordered a roast pig. He invited me and two women friends to dine with him; but, it being brought too soon upon the table, he could not resist the temptation, and ate the whole before we came."
The trial resulted about as Benjamin anticipated, and he got out of it as much fun as he expected. Keimer proved himself a greater pig than the one he swallowed. At the same time, the result left Keimer without a claim on Benjamin to advocate the new sect. So the scheme was dropped.
Keimer was no match for Benjamin in disputation. With the use of the Socratic way of reasoning, Benjamin discomfited him every time; so that he grew shy and suspicious. In his ripe years, Benjamin wrote of those days, and said:
"Keimer and I lived on a pretty good familiar footing, and agreed tolerably well; for he suspected nothing of my setting up. He retained a great deal of his old enthusiasm, and loved argumentation. We therefore had many disputations. I used to work him so with my Socratic method, and had trepanned him so often by questions apparently so distant from any point we had in hand, yet by degrees leading to the point and bringing him into difficulties and contradictions, that at last he grew ridiculously cautious, and would hardly answer me the most common question, without asking first, 'What do you intend to infer from that?' However, it gave him so high an opinion of my abilities in the confuting way, that he seriously proposed my being his colleague in a project he had of setting up a new sect. He was to preach the doctrines, and I was to confound all opponents."