Lay-preaching and the ministry of the Word ran strong in the Trimblerigg family, also in that of the Hubbacks, to which on his mother’s side Jonathan belonged; and had he cared to divide himself spiritually among his relations there were five sects from which to choose—a division of creeds which did not amount to much, except in the case of the True Believers. Grandfather Hubback, between whom and Uncle Phineas there was theological war, ministered to the Free Evangelicals at the Bethesda which Jonathan had helped to renovate; Uncle James was a Primitive Brother; Uncle Jonah a First Resurrectionist; his Sunday exercise—the practising of the Last Trump—a welcome relief perhaps, from his weekday occupation of undertaker. Mr. Trimblerigg, during his childhood, had sat under all of them; the difference being that under his Uncle Phineas he had been made to sit. Then came the question of his own call to the ministry, and the further question as to ways and means. It was from then on that Mr. Trimblerigg went more constantly and willingly to hear the doctrine of the True Believers, and began to display towards it something wider than an open mind. At the age of fifteen he had got into the habit of going to see and hear his uncle on weekdays as well, and very quietly he would endure for hours together while the old man expounded his unchangeable theology.
Everything about Uncle Phineas was long, including his discourses. He had a long head, a long nose, a long upper lip and a long chin. To these his beard served as a corrective; long also, it stuck out at right angles from his face, till with the weight of its projection it began to droop; at that point he trimmed it hard and square, making no compromise, and if none admired it except its owner, it was at least in character. With such a beard you could not kiss people, and Phineas Trimblerigg was not of a mind to kiss anybody. In spite of old age, it retained a hue which suggested a too hasty breakfast of under-boiled egg; while trying to become grey it remained reminiscently golden.
And the beard symbolized the man; square, blunt and upright, patriarchal in mind and character, he lived in a golden age of the past—the age of romantic theology before science had come to disturb it. His only Tree of Knowledge was the Bible, and this not only in matters of doctrine; it was his tree of genealogy and history as well. From its topmost branch he surveyed a world six thousand years old, of six days making, and all the wonders that followed,—the Flood, the Tower whose height had threatened Heaven, and the plagues, pestilences and famines, loosed by an outraged Deity on a stubborn but chosen people, and the sun and the moon which stood still to assist in tribal slaughter, and the special vehicles provided for prophets, at one time a chariot of fire, at another a great fish, at another a talking ass,—all these things gave him no mental trouble whatever; but joy rather, and confidence, and an abiding faith. He believed them literally, and had required that his family should believe them too. And truly he could say that, in one way or another, he had to begin with made them all God-fearing. If in the process five had died young, and one run away to sea and got drowned, and another fallen into evil courses from which he had not returned alive, so that Phineas in his old age was left childless—all this had but made him more patriarchal in outlook than ever, turning his attention upon nephews and nieces of the second generation, especially upon one; which, indeed, is the reason why here he becomes an important character.
Fortified by fifty years of prudent investment based upon revelation, and with a comfortable balance at his bank, he cast his other cares upon the Lord; lived frugally, gave a just tithe of all he possessed to the foreign and home missions of the True Believers, drank no wine or strong drink—except tea, denounced the smoking of tobacco, but took it as snuff, believed firmly in Hell, war, and corporal punishment for men, women and children alike, was still an elected, though a non-attending, member of all local bodies, but in the parliamentary election (regarding it as the evil thing) would take no part. To him life, in the main, meant theology.
At the now sharply dividing ways he stood with old Pastor Hubback (or rather against him) a leading and a rival light among the local Free Churches; and because he had money to give and to leave he was still a power in the district as well as in his own family. This was the oracle to which Mr. Trimblerigg, in his fifteenth year, began to give up his half-holidays.
Uncle Phineas was always at home; he had legs which never allowed him to get farther than his own gate, except once a week to the Tabernacle of True Belief, of which he was minister and owner. The larger chapel in the village lower down had not known him for thirty years when the youthful Jonathan first became aware of his importance, and began under parental direction to pay a weekly call at ‘Pisgah,’ and there learn from the old patriarch things about himself and others, including God, to which he listened with an air of great respect and interest.
Jonathan’s way with him was wily but simple: he would ask a great number of intelligent questions, and receiving unintelligent answers would appear satisfied. Now and then, upon his birthday, or when revivalism was in the air, the old man would give him sixpence, sometimes even a shilling, advising him to bestow it upon the foreign missions of the stricter Evangelicals, especially those to the native races of Central Africa and America, where the undiluted truth of the Word had still necessarily to be taught. For those primitive minds the taint of modernism had no effect; Heaven had so shaped them to the divine purpose that nothing short of literal True Belief could touch their hearts and soften their understandings. And the old man would talk wondrously to Jonathan of how, in the evil days to come, these black races were destined to become the repository of the true faith and reconvert the world to the purer doctrine.
Uncle Phineas was on the look-out for punishment on a world-wide scale, and had he lived to see it, the War of Versailles would have gladdened his heart. For he wanted all the Nations to be punished, including his own,—a point on which Mr. Trimblerigg ventured privately to differ from him; being in that matter a Free Evangelical, and preferring Heaven to Hell. Uncle Phineas preferred Hell; punishment was owing, and the imaginary infliction of it was what in the main attracted him to religion.
Punishment: first and foremost for man’s breaking of the Sabbath; then followed in order drink, horse-racing, gambling, the increase of divorces, modernism, and the higher criticism, with all its resultant forms of infidelity, the agitation for Women’s Suffrage, and finally the impious attempt of Labour to depose Capital.
All these things were of the Devil and must be fought; and in the discussion of them Jonathan began—not to be in a difficulty because some of them made an appeal to his dawning intelligence, but to become agile. Luckily for him Uncle Phineas’s information was very nearly as narrow as his intelligence, and Mr. Trimblerigg was able to jump to and fro across his sedentary and parochial mind with small fear of discovery. But the repeated interviews made him brisk, supple, and conversationally adaptable; and once when the old man remarked half-approvingly, ‘Aye, Jonathan, you’ve got eyes in your head, but don’t let ’em out by the back door,’ he had a momentary qualm lest behind that observation dangerous knowledge might lurk.