‘You’ll do as the Lord tells you,’ said his uncle. ‘It’s no good one that’s not a True Believer talking of what he’ll do when he becomes one.’
‘No, Uncle,’ said Jonathan meekly, still out to do business; ‘but living at home makes it very hard for me. I’m much nearer to being a True Believer than Mother is, or Father, or Davidina. Davidina says you can believe anything if you’ll only make yourself. She says she could make herself believe that the Bible was all false, if she were to try.’
‘Has she tried, does she mean?’ inquired Uncle Phineas grimly.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Jonathan ingenuously. ‘It would be very wicked if anyone did try, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would,’ said his uncle. ‘I’ve known men struck down dead for less. I knew a man once who tore a leaf out of his Bible to light his pipe with, and he was struck by lightning for it the same day. Yet his sin was only against one leaf, one chapter. How much greater the sin if you sin against the whole of it. She thought that, did she? When you go home, send Davidina up to me: I’ll talk to her.’
Then Mr. Trimblerigg had a divided mind; for his fear of Davidina was not less but rather more than his fear of Uncle Phineas. Indeed he only feared Uncle Phineas for what he might fail to do for him in the near future, but Davidina he feared for what she was, here and now.
‘I think, perhaps, Davidina only meant—anybody who was wicked enough. But please don’t tell Davidina that I said anything!’
‘Heh?’ cried Uncle Phineas, his eye suspicious: ‘That so? We’ll see.’
He got up, went slowly to his Bible and opened it and without looking put down his thumb.
‘Listen to this, Jonathan,’ he said; and in solemn tone and with long pauses, he read: