HONEST BEN
Robert Meyers

I have of late been visiting different churches, and the experience reminds me of something read once in Ben Franklin’s Autobiography. Ben is nothing if not honest in his description of how he went off on occasion to Philadelphia and was from time to time prevailed upon to go to church, once for five Sundays in a row. Had the minister been different, this might have turned into a habit, a possibility Ben admits:

“Had he been in my opinion a good preacher, perhaps I might have continued, notwithstanding the occasion I had for the Sunday’s leisure in my course of study; but his discourses were chiefly either polemic arguments, or explications of the peculiar doctrines of our sect, and were all to me very dry, uninteresting, and unedifying, since not a single moral principle was inculcated or enforced, their aim seeming to be rather to make us Presbyterians than good citizens.”

One day the minister took for himself a text which promised more. When he chose Phillippians 4:8 (“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, honest, just, pure, lovely, or of good report, if there be any virtue, or any praise, think on these things”), Franklin supposed the sermon would at last contain some morality.

“But he confined himself to five points only, as meant by the apostle, viz.: 1. Keeping holy the Sabbath day. 2. Being diligent in reading the holy Scriptures. 3. Attending duly the publick worship. 4. Partaking of the Sacrament. 5. Paying a due respect to God’s ministers. These might be all good things; but, as they were not the kind of good things that I expected from that text, I despaired of ever meeting with them from any other, was disgusted, and attended his preaching no more.”

There is nothing wrong, of course, in any of the five admonitions given by the preacher, even that rather self-serving last one, but that Paul’s wide-ranging poetry should have been reduced to these legalisms is too much like what some of us have found too often in pulpits.

There is, by the way, a little later in Franklin’s Autobiography a story which illustrates a weakness we all share. Ben recalls a neighbor of his who bought an axe from a blacksmith. The blacksmith agreed to grind the face of the axe bright for the purchaser if he would turn the wheel. The man agreed and turned the wheel while the smith pressed the broad face of the axe hard and heavily on the stone, which made the turning of it very fatiguing.

Every now and then the buyer stepped over from the wheel to see how the work was going. Finally he said he would take his axe as it was, with no more grinding. “No,” said the smith, “turn on, turn on; we shall have it bright by and by; as yet, it is only speckled.”

“Yes,” said the man, “but I think I like a speckled axe best.”

Surely I am not the only one like that neighbor of Ben’s. We think we want certain things, but as the cost of having them goes up much higher than we had supposed it might, we ruefully settle for much less and go home happy with a speckled axe.

With Ben Franklin still on my mind, I remember a great utterance by Roger Williams in a book of his called The Bloudy Tenent. Said he: “In vaine have English Parliaments permitted English Bibles in the poorest English houses, and the simplest man or woman to search the Scriptures, if yet against their soules perswasion from the Scripture, they should be forced (as if they lived in Spaine or Rome itself without the sight of a Bible) to beleeve as the Church beleeves.”

We still find it hard to accept this kind of freedom for all Christians, don’t we? The tendency of almost every Church is to force its own interpretations upon all who would be a part of it. Liberty is too costly for most of us; we do not prize it enough to pay the price and stand before God with no bulwark but our own consciences.