Trimblerigg

IT would not have been well for Mr. Trimblerigg—for his training as an adept in the art of getting on—had his early ministerial career been entirely without obstacles. Had circumstances not kept him on the jump, his native agility might possibly have diminished; but from the very beginning obstacles presented themselves, and they were not all of one kind.

The first which confronted him was intellectual and temperamental. It had been all very well in his early novitiate to act as occasional lay-preacher to that sect of rigid Believers with bottle-necked minds; a callow and undogmatic theology was then permissible. But now, being called to the ministry, he must get to the heart of things, and let his light shine there. True Believers expected it; and elders from afar, men placed in authority, came to listen to this young and rising hope of a diminished community, in order to discover whether his oratory had weight and substance, or was merely words.

It was Mr. Trimblerigg’s fixed intention to get himself driven out of that narrow communion so soon as he could afford it; but meantime he had to maintain the verbal verities of the faith, a difficult matter when his ministry extended to three discourses a week, two on the Sabbath and one every Wednesday.

For awhile he kept himself going on the Song of Songs, the literal interpretation of which provided him with poetic flights and passages of local colour congenial to his youthful temperament. Poetry in the pulpit was a new thing. His spiritual interpretations of love attracted the courting couples of the neighbourhood; youth flocked to hear him, with occasional results which made the watchful elders uneasy. It is true that on Sunday evenings the chapel was always crowded, but his congregation of youths and maidens, coming from a distance, showed more punctuality in arriving than in returning home; and now and then, as a consequence, marriages had to be hasty.

Before long Mr. Trimblerigg’s Watch Committee called upon him to talk less of love, with its bundles of myrrh, its vineyards and gardens of spice, and to concentrate a little more on those starker and more characteristic verities of the faith—sin, death, judgment and damnation.

Under this doctrinal pressure Mr. Trimblerigg became futurist. He started a course on the literal interpretation of prophecy. It was a branch of theology which the modern school of Free Evangelicalism had neglectfully allowed to go out of fashion, fearing perhaps what definite repudiation might involve. Here Mr. Trimblerigg saw his way. Unfulfilled prophecy had this advantage: it could always be apprehended and never disproved. Also the sleeping atavisms of human nature favoured it; just as they favour palmistry and table-turning, and the avoidance of going under ladders or looking at the new moon through glass. When these currents of instinctive credulity are wisely drawn into the service of religion they may do great things. And so it was that Mr. Trimblerigg made a slight mistake when without meaning to do great things in his present connection, he let himself go.

Before he had realized the danger, his chapel became full to overflowing; crowds far larger than it would hold waited at the door; and through that, and through windows set wide, his word went forth into the world and stirred it more than he wished it to be stirred.

Reporters came to listen to him; Free Evangelicals of the older school wobbled and came over; and while his own congregations increased, down at the larger chapel below Grandfather Hubback’s diminished, and relations became strained.

This was not what Mr. Trimblerigg had intended; meaning only to temporize he had exalted himself to a height from which it would be difficult, when the time came for it, to make an unconspicuous descent. He did not wish his ministry among the True Believers to remain memorable; but when upon the platform the word came to him with power, it was very difficult to refrain. It was also very difficult to remember afterwards what he had actually said: Mr. Trimblerigg had too much verbal inspiration of a momentary kind. If this sort of thing went on long, he might establish a record against himself fatal to his future career.

The Free Evangelicals were beginning to feel sore; the door which he wished kept open for him in a friendly spirit, might narrow, might even close against him in the day of his need.

And then two things happened which he turned briskly to account.

The first was an invitation from the Synod of True Believers to deliver the set discourse at the Annual Congress.

It was a great, an unexpected, and an embarrassing honour; for the set discourse, by unwritten tradition, was always given in defiance of modern theology and in defence of the literal interpretation of Scripture.

If he did this to the satisfaction of the True Believers, his secession to the Ministry of Free Evangelicalism in the immediate future would become almost impossible.

But Mr. Trimblerigg, though his other virtues might be fleeting or fluctuating, had a nimble courage which stayed fixed. After humbly and fervently informing me of his intention, under the guise of a request for guidance, he accepted the invitation and sat down to write the thesis which precipitated his career two years ahead of the course he had planned for it.

The second circumstance, embarrassing but helpful to the same end, was the reappearance of Isabel Sparling, heading a deputation of women who, feeling called to the ministry, now saw an opportunity which they were not going to let slip. As select preacher before the Assembly it was, they told him, his bounden duty to crown his allegiance to their cause in public advocacy of the ministration of women; and when he pleaded that the literal interpretation of Scripture must be his theme, they replied by requiring him to concentrate on the literal interpretation of certain texts—mainly in the Old Testament—conclusive of their claim.

In the discussion that followed, the deputation saw their opportunity slipping away from them. Mr. Trimblerigg was willing to support their cause, but only, as he said, ‘in his own time and in his own way.’ And that time was not now, and his way was not theirs. Tempers grew hot, words flew, the deputation went forth in dudgeon; Isabel Sparling gave him a parting look; it meant business, it also meant mischief. She was, he knew, a woman of high ability, and a determined character: and now, on public and on private ground, she was become his enemy.

In the six months which intervened before the day of Congress, the women’s spiritual movement broke into flame and heat, and they began that phenomenal campaign of Church Militancy which has since made history. They began by entering a motion for Congress in support of their claim; but as women, though congregational electors, could not sit in the Assembly, and as they could get no member to give his name to their motion, it was ruled out of order and returned to them.

Then in the chapels of the True Believers the word of the Lord was heard by the mouths of women; what Congress sought to silence, at meeting they made known; they went forth in bands of three or four, or sometimes they went solitary, and entering into the congregations like lambs became as wolves.

When it seemed good to them that the preacher should end his prayer, they cried ‘Amen’, and in the midst of his discourse they spoke as the spirit gave them utterance. It was a demonstration that the gift of prophecy, like murder, must out, and that if a place in order be not found for it, it must come by disorder. So they presented their case, by example and not by argument, and the congregations of True Belief dealt with them, or tried to deal with them, in various ways painful or persuasive, but none prevailed. For this phenomenon, they claimed, was spiritual, and could only be cured spiritually in the granting of their demand; while the coercion practised on them, being merely material, must necessarily fail.

And so spiritually chaining themselves to their chairs, they were materially carried out, and spiritually interrupting the eloquence of others were materially suppressed under extinguishers which deprived them of breath; and for what they truly believed to be their unconquerable right True Belief could find no remedy.

From the moment when it had first sparkled into life, this sacred flame had, of course, found at Mount Horeb an altar for its fires, and in Mr. Trimblerigg a victim suited to its need. There Isabel Sparling came in person, for the first time openly, but afterwards in disguise, and there they wrestled together for an eloquence which tried to be simultaneous but failed. And though, with preparation and practice, he did better against interruption than she, yet even there she beat him; for if her remarks were disjointed and ejaculatory it did not much matter, whereas for him sound alone was not sufficient, but he must keep up the thread of his discourse, rise superior in eloquence as well as in sense to the reiterated ‘Alleluias’ of Miss Sparling’s inspired utterance, and all the while put a Christian face upon the matter, which was the most difficult thing of all.

Three times was Miss Sparling cast forth from the midst of the congregation, before the doorkeepers became efficient in penetrating her disguise. The third time Mr. Trimblerigg, losing his temper, had used what sounded like incitement to violence, and Miss Sparling getting her leg broken, brought an action and obtained damages, fifty pounds.

This was regarded by the movement as a great spiritual victory, and a victory it was. The law of the land, finding that True Believers had no fixed ritual of public worship, and that male members of its congregations might preach or pray without comment when the spirit moved them, acquitted Miss Sparling either of brawling or of conduct conducive to a breach of the peace, and held responsible for the damage those who had so ruthlessly ejected her. It admitted, however, that they would be within their rights in keeping her out. This for the future they did, and when, as her next spiritual exercise, Miss Sparling returned and broke all the chapel windows as a way of joining in worship, they got her sent to prison for it. There, still led by the spirit, she hunger-struck and got out again; just too late unfortunately to hear Mr. Trimblerigg deliver his sensational discourse to the Annual Congress, a discourse to the force of which she had, without knowing it, contributed: for six months of the women’s Church Militancy had been enough to convince Mr. Trimblerigg that a connection in which they had become active was one from which he himself must sever.

And so, on the opening day of Congress, setting the note for all that was to follow, Mr. Trimblerigg delivered his mercurial and magnetic address on ‘The Weight of Testimony.’ Therein he upheld without a quiver of doubt the verbal inspiration of Scripture; it was, he argued, the true and literal setting forth of things actually said and done by a chosen people finding their spiritual way and losing it; but in that to-and-fro history of loss and gain many things were recorded for our learning upon the sole testimony of men whose minds still stumbled in darkness, and who, therefore, had not the whole truth in them; but where their fallible testimony infallibly recorded by Scripture actually began, or where it ended, was not a matter of inspiration at all but of textual criticism, because in ancient Hebrew manuscripts quotation marks were left out. Thus Holy Scripture, once written, had become subject to vicissitudes at the hands of expurgators, emendators, and copyists, even as the sacred ark of the Covenant which, having at one time fallen into the hands of the Philistines, and at another been desecrated by the polluting touch of Uzzah, was finally carried away in triumph to pagan Rome, and there lost.

Having thus shown how the most sacred receptacles of the Divine purpose were not immune from the accidents of time, he drew and extended his parallel, and from this, his main thesis, proceeded to give instances, and to restore quotation marks as an indication of where textual criticism might be said to begin and inspiration to end.

Before long holy fear like a fluttered dove fleeing from a hawk had entered that assembly, and beards had begun to shake with apprehension as to what might come next.

Mr. Trimblerigg warmed to his work; his sensations were those of a fireman who, in order to display his courage and efficiency in the fighting of flames, has set a light to his own fire-station; and while it crackles under his feet, he strikes an attitude, directs his hose and pours out a flood of salvation.

When he started to give his instances, their devastating effect was all that he could desire. He tackled Joshua’s command to the sun to stand still, restored the quotation marks, pointed out how in that instance Holy Scripture had expressly referred it back to its only authority, the Book of Jassher: and how the Book of Jassher being outside the canon of Scripture was of no standing to impose its poetic legends on the mind of a True Believer. Why then, it might be asked, had reference been made to it at all? He adumbrated a prophetic significance, a spiritual value, to which by that parable the human race was afterwards to attain.

Joshua’s command to the sun now found its true address in the human heart, and the reason why Scripture had recorded it at so early a date was in order that it might find fulfilment and illustration in that greater Scripture uttered upwards of a thousand years later by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians, ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.’ That was the true meaning of Joshua’s command for those who read Scripture, not by picking at it in parts, but by reading it as it ought to be read as one great harmonious, consistent, homogeneous, and indivisible whole.

On that uplifting string of adjectives Mr. Trimblerigg stopped to breathe, and his hearers breathed with him loud and deep.

That answering sound, whatever it might mean, gave Mr. Trimblerigg the poetic push which the gasp of a listening audience always supplied, ‘Yea, I say unto you, yea!’ he cried, and paused. He was in deep waters, he knew; so, breaking into an eloquent passage about ships—ships at sea, ships that pass in the night, ships that have Jonahs on board, ships that cling to the anchor, and ships that have no anchor wherewith to cling, ships of the desert seeking for water and finding none, ships that making for the North Pole stick fast in ice, yet continue moving toward their destined goal, ships that go out like ravens and return no more, ships that come home like doves to roost carrying their sheaves with them—so experimenting on wings of poesy in that seaward direction to which, though he had never been there, his pulpit oratory so often carried him, he almost succeeded, or almost seemed to succeed, in carrying his audience with him; for indeed it is very difficult, when beautiful spiritual similes are being uttered, for an audience to remain cold and critical, and remind itself that figures of speech have nothing to do with sound doctrine.

It is also difficult when a speaker speaks with so much beauty and fervour and imaginative mimicry, as on this occasion did Mr. Trimblerigg, not to see him as he sees himself; for the self-hypnotism of the orator is a catching thing—and nations have often been caught by it to their destruction, and churches to heresy almost before they knew.

But the True Believers, though momentarily moved, were not carried away; and when Mr. Trimblerigg returned to his instances his audience was still against him.

He took the characters of the Hebrew prophets and examined them; he showed that the sins and shortcomings of Eli’s judgeship, for which Eli had been condemned, were reproduced under the judgeship of Samuel when he, in his turn, grew old, and that it was really only as Samuel’s own word for it that the people stood condemned in asking for a King. Holy Scripture had truly recorded that incident; but was Samuel, the ineffective ruler whose sons took bribes and perverted judgment, was he a witness altogether above suspicion when his own deposition from power was the question to be decided on? And so round the testimony of Samuel he put quotation marks, and relieved Scripture of the burden of that unjust judgment the approval of which was Samuel’s, and Samuel’s alone.

And then he took Elisha and the cursing of the children, and the she-bears tearing of them, and there, too, he restored the quotation marks. He threw no doubt upon the incident, but its reading as a moral emblem was the reading of Elisha, and the tearing of the forty-two children had found its interpretation in the wish of the prophet misreading it as the will of God. Other instances followed: there with the testimony of Scripture before him, stood Mr. Trimblerigg inserting quotation marks for the restoration of its morals, dividing the sheep from the goats, trying to show where inspiration ended and where textual criticism began.

Judged by outside standards it was not a learned discourse, even Mr. Trimblerigg would not have claimed that for it; but it was vivacious and eloquent, and not lacking in common sense; and as common sense was preeminently the quality for which in relation to the interpretation of Scripture the True Believers had no use, the result was a foregone conclusion.

When he had finished Mr. Trimblerigg sat down to a dead silence, and the presiding minister rose. Deeply, bitterly, unsparingly Mr. Trimblerigg’s thesis was there and then condemned as utterly subversive of the revealed Word. More than that, Congress by a unanimous vote expunged it from the record of its proceedings; not by the most diligent search in the archives of True Belief will any reference to Mr. Trimblerigg’s address on ‘the Weight of Testimony’ be found.

But the discourse had done its work, and Mr. Trimblerigg knew that he left the Congress theologically free for the new-shaping of his career.

It was true that the Chapel of Mount Horeb, with house attached, was still his own; but within a week the stipend pertaining thereto had been withdrawn, and the Trustees, believing themselves to be deprived of the chapel, had already begun the hire of temporary premises.

But Mr. Trimblerigg’s instinct did not play him false; and when acknowledging his dismissal at the hands of the Trustees he informed them that the chapel was still open to them, free of charge and without condition. He was sure, he said, that this was what his uncle would have wished.

And having done all this, he felt that he had committed a great act of faith; he felt also that he had done at last something which could not fail to win the admiration of Davidina.

Davidina was not herself a True Believer; but she had done him the compliment to come from a distance to hear his discourse; and much he wanted to know what she thought of it. There was the added circumstance that she had a direct interest—not theological but financial—in the severance which had now taken place, and it was with elated curiosity that he looked her in the eyes—with a look more straight and unembarrassed than he could usually muster—to see how she had taken it.

He found her waiting for him outside.

‘Well, what d’you think of that?’ he inquired.

‘I think you’d have made a wonderful jockey,’ she replied. ‘You’d have made your fortune.’

‘Jockey?’ he said, puzzled. ‘I didn’t exactly pull it off this time, at any rate.’

‘No,’ she replied. ‘Did you mean to?’

‘Yes; I did my best.’

‘That I’m sure.’

‘How d’you define a jockey?’ he asked uneasily, irritated by her fixed abstention from further comment.

‘There’s your own definition,’ she said, ‘you wrote it in a school essay. I kept it because I thought it was good. I won’t spoil it; I’ll send it you.’

And the next day the essay, which he had entirely forgotten, written in a round boyish hand, reached him by post.

‘A jockey,’ he read, ‘is one who had trained himself from early years in the dangerous and delicate art of falling from a horse.’

Accompanying it was a cheque for a hundred pounds. ‘No wonder!’ said Mr. Trimblerigg, ‘she feels that she owes me something now.’ For by what he had just done he was giving her the right, twelve years hence, to continue as main beneficiary under the will of Uncle Phineas.

Nevertheless he was pleased that he had pleased her. It was almost the first time he had known it happen. Davidina’s opinion of him counted much more than he liked. All his growing years he had tried to escape from her, and still he had failed.