“She put her hand to the nail ... and her right hand to the workman’s hammer ... and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head ... when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.”... You hear that, Jonathan?’
‘Yes, Uncle,’ he replied, not yet understanding the application of the text.
‘You see, Jonathan,’ said his uncle, ‘Davidina was getting at you.’
Being a True Believer’s interpretation, it was not open to discussion, not for Jonathan at any rate. Uncle Phineas was a mighty hunter of the Scriptures before the Lord: the true interpretation never escaped him.
It was a curious and unexplained fact that Davidina was a great favourite of Uncle Phineas, so far as one so entirely without affection could be said to have favourites. Davidina was far from being a True Believer, yet he trusted her; and he did not yet quite trust Jonathan. But he saw well enough that Jonathan had in him the makings of a prophet and of a preacher; if only he could trust him, he would help him to go far. But the testing process took time.
So, day by day, Mr. Trimblerigg laboured to win his trust, and often, after long hours of boredom in his uncle’s company, success seemed near; for intellectually he was now growing fast, and to the cultivation of an agile brain added the cultivation of a wily tongue, and even where his future career did not depend upon it he loved to sustain an argument.
But he never got the better of Uncle Phineas; for when Phineas could not answer him, the Book did. He began to loathe the Book—that particular copy of it, I mean—and to make faces at it behind his uncle’s back. But a day came when he loved it like a brother.
At the right time for the forwarding of his plans, Mr. Trimblerigg professed a desire for larger book-learning; he wanted to study theology, and that not from one point of view alone. Ready to satisfy him, up to a point, Uncle Phineas plied him with books containing the true doctrine, some he would make him sit down and read aloud upon the spot while he expounded them; others he let him take away to study and return, questioning him closely thereafter to discover how well he had read them. They were all good books—good in the moral sense, that is to say—books written to inculcate the principles of True Belief; but all, from the contemporary point of view utterly useless, and all deadly dull.
One day Mr. Trimblerigg asked his uncle, ‘Where all the other books were—the bad ones, which taught false doctrine.’
Why did he want to know? inquired Uncle Phineas.