Mr. Trimblerigg did not wait for his uncle to speak, he grasped his nettle tight. ‘Will you take the responsibility now, Uncle, of telling me that the Lord has not called me; and that I have not plainly heard His Word?’
Uncle Phineas could not quite do that. All he said was: ‘Nineveh? Nineveh might mean anything.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr. Trimblerigg, ‘it might; but it doesn’t. If the Lord is calling me—and you can’t say that He isn’t—will He not also make me sure what the call means?’
‘We will ask Him again, Jonathan.’
‘We will not,’ said Jonathan. ‘That would be sin, for it would be tempting Him, trying to make Him think that we have not heard Him already—in our hearts.’
‘Spoken like a True Believer,’ said Uncle Phineas, convinced at last. ‘Jonathan, you shall go.’
Very earnestly that night did Mr. Trimblerigg return thanks that I had opened the eyes of his Uncle Phineas and made him see light. And all the while that he prayed, how helpless he made me feel! Lost in the delight of the end, he forgot the means: and never once did it occur to him that he was really giving thanks to himself.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Moving Spirit
SO Mr. Trimblerigg went to college to learn tribal divinity as falsely taught by the Free Evangelicals; and his Uncle Phineas paid for it.
He went there as a True Believer; and his fellow-students viewed with wonder so coming-on a disposition confined to so strait and narrow an interpretation of things spiritual. For at that time a great wave of Liberalism had entered the larger bodies of the Free Church Movement, and the Free Evangelicals led the way. They had even gone so far as to admit women students to their University and to its theological studies, though not of course to the ministry; and because of this and similar tendencies, the wider and easier interpretation of Scripture concerned them greatly.