But it was only his uncle’s constitutional disapproval of a mind that could move; and of Jonathan’s outside doings and opinions he had at that time heard nothing to rouse suspicion. But clearly when Mr. Trimblerigg was called to the ministry and began to preach there would be a difficulty; for what would go down at Bethesda among the Free Evangelicals, where his obvious career was awaiting him, would not do up at Horeb, the chapel on the hill; and it was well within the bounds of possibility that owing to his family connections Mr. Trimblerigg might find it advantageous to preach at both.
That, however, was a problem still lying some few years away; meanwhile Uncle Phineas might very reasonably die; and it was just about this time that I heard Mr. Trimblerigg beginning to pray for peace to the old man in his declining years, that he might not be kept unduly on the rack of this tough world after so good a life.
And indeed it was a life in which he had accomplished much; for a man of his small beginnings he had become of notable substance, and his income derived from quarries and the houses he had built for his workers was reckoned to amount to anything from six to eight hundred a year, of which, in spite of generous gifts to foreign missions, he did not spend one-half.
His expectant relatives did not talk among themselves about the matter where, of necessity, interests were divided; but they thought much, and occasionally they had their fears.
‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Jonathan’s father one day, ‘if when Uncle dies it isn’t found that he had an unsound mind.’
It was to obviate such a calamity that Jonathan was sent to pay his weekly visit, and that one or another of the family, at least once every Sunday, went up to Horeb to pray.
Quite early in his examination of the tenets of True Belief, anxious that she should keep him in countenance, Mr. Trimblerigg asked Davidina what she thought of them.
‘My belief is,’ said Davidina, ‘that we can all believe what we want to believe; and if you only believe it enough, it comes true—for you, at any rate. You can believe every word of the Bible is true, or that every word of it is false; and either way, you can live up to it. The True Believers are right there, anyway. And if,’ she added, ‘you’ve got nothing else to believe, you can believe in yourself: and you can smile at yourself in the glass, and look at your teeth, and think they are milestones on the road to Heaven, till they all drop out. Believing’s easy; it’s choosing what you mean to believe that matters. I believe the kettle’s boiling over.’
She went, leaving Mr. Trimblerigg to his meditations, also to a doubt whether she had taken him quite seriously.
With his Uncle Phineas it was all the other way; they were nothing if not serious together; but it often puzzled his ingenuous mind how his uncle managed to believe all the things he did.