The first which confronted him was intellectual and temperamental. It had been all very well in his early novitiate to act as occasional lay-preacher to that sect of rigid Believers with bottle-necked minds; a callow and undogmatic theology was then permissible. But now, being called to the ministry, he must get to the heart of things, and let his light shine there. True Believers expected it; and elders from afar, men placed in authority, came to listen to this young and rising hope of a diminished community, in order to discover whether his oratory had weight and substance, or was merely words.
It was Mr. Trimblerigg’s fixed intention to get himself driven out of that narrow communion so soon as he could afford it; but meantime he had to maintain the verbal verities of the faith, a difficult matter when his ministry extended to three discourses a week, two on the Sabbath and one every Wednesday.
For awhile he kept himself going on the Song of Songs, the literal interpretation of which provided him with poetic flights and passages of local colour congenial to his youthful temperament. Poetry in the pulpit was a new thing. His spiritual interpretations of love attracted the courting couples of the neighbourhood; youth flocked to hear him, with occasional results which made the watchful elders uneasy. It is true that on Sunday evenings the chapel was always crowded, but his congregation of youths and maidens, coming from a distance, showed more punctuality in arriving than in returning home; and now and then, as a consequence, marriages had to be hasty.
Before long Mr. Trimblerigg’s Watch Committee called upon him to talk less of love, with its bundles of myrrh, its vineyards and gardens of spice, and to concentrate a little more on those starker and more characteristic verities of the faith—sin, death, judgment and damnation.
Under this doctrinal pressure Mr. Trimblerigg became futurist. He started a course on the literal interpretation of prophecy. It was a branch of theology which the modern school of Free Evangelicalism had neglectfully allowed to go out of fashion, fearing perhaps what definite repudiation might involve. Here Mr. Trimblerigg saw his way. Unfulfilled prophecy had this advantage: it could always be apprehended and never disproved. Also the sleeping atavisms of human nature favoured it; just as they favour palmistry and table-turning, and the avoidance of going under ladders or looking at the new moon through glass. When these currents of instinctive credulity are wisely drawn into the service of religion they may do great things. And so it was that Mr. Trimblerigg made a slight mistake when without meaning to do great things in his present connection, he let himself go.
Before he had realized the danger, his chapel became full to overflowing; crowds far larger than it would hold waited at the door; and through that, and through windows set wide, his word went forth into the world and stirred it more than he wished it to be stirred.
Reporters came to listen to him; Free Evangelicals of the older school wobbled and came over; and while his own congregations increased, down at the larger chapel below Grandfather Hubback’s diminished, and relations became strained.
This was not what Mr. Trimblerigg had intended; meaning only to temporize he had exalted himself to a height from which it would be difficult, when the time came for it, to make an unconspicuous descent. He did not wish his ministry among the True Believers to remain memorable; but when upon the platform the word came to him with power, it was very difficult to refrain. It was also very difficult to remember afterwards what he had actually said: Mr. Trimblerigg had too much verbal inspiration of a momentary kind. If this sort of thing went on long, he might establish a record against himself fatal to his future career.
The Free Evangelicals were beginning to feel sore; the door which he wished kept open for him in a friendly spirit, might narrow, might even close against him in the day of his need.
And then two things happened which he turned briskly to account.