“I saw this man once more, about a month after the house was finished. He told me, he went every Sunday to hear Mr Hall; and ‘ma’am,’ he added, ‘I do believe I am beginning to see some things very different from what I did.’”
We separated that evening with the pleasant feeling that we had become better acquainted, and had found more subjects of common interest than we had expected.
Exception may be taken, and with apparent justice, that I have made no effort to disabuse the mind of this man of its many prejudices and antipathies. Formerly, when I was not so well acquainted with the habits of thought and feeling among working-men as I now am, I used to expend considerable time and trouble in endeavouring to remove their prejudices; but it never appeared to me that I effected any real good in this way. The men were usually so far beyond me in acuteness and capacity to detect and expose what they considered inconsistencies, that if I succeeded in clearing one victim from imputation, another was readily substituted. I have, therefore, come to the conclusion that it is better from the first to treat it as something altogether irrelevant, and not worthy of notice. Instead of wasting precious time, and losing opportunities that may never again present themselves, in arguing about the right and the wrong of other people, I usually meet such attacks in this way:—“Supposing these people are as bad as you say, I cannot see that their faults can make any difference to you, beyond inducing you to be more careful that you yourself entirely abstain from what you seem so to dislike in others. God’s law is, ‘So then, every one of us must give an account of himself to God.’ He has written a perfect law that we may study it, and seek to conform ourselves to it; and to prevent the possibility of our erring through the want of living example, He has Himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, lived our earthly life to teach us how to live. Your making your own conduct depend so much upon what other people do, is like the folly of a man who would shut the shutters of his room, excluding all daylight, and then complain that the dim, flickering, uncertain light of the rushlight he had substituted, was insufficient to enable him to do his work properly. If this man, when taking home his work, were to excuse himself to the master for its being so badly done, on the ground that the light of his rushlight was insufficient and uncertain, the master would reply, I never intended you to work by that light; it is none of my providing. You wilfully shut out the glorious sun set up for your use in the heavens, and which I knew would be more than sufficient for every purpose. Whilst you were groping about almost in the dark, it was even then surrounding you, waiting only to be permitted to enter. The blame of this bad work, therefore, returns upon you, and upon you only.”