From the moment when it had first sparkled into life, this sacred flame had, of course, found at Mount Horeb an altar for its fires, and in Mr. Trimblerigg a victim suited to its need. There Isabel Sparling came in person, for the first time openly, but afterwards in disguise, and there they wrestled together for an eloquence which tried to be simultaneous but failed. And though, with preparation and practice, he did better against interruption than she, yet even there she beat him; for if her remarks were disjointed and ejaculatory it did not much matter, whereas for him sound alone was not sufficient, but he must keep up the thread of his discourse, rise superior in eloquence as well as in sense to the reiterated ‘Alleluias’ of Miss Sparling’s inspired utterance, and all the while put a Christian face upon the matter, which was the most difficult thing of all.
Three times was Miss Sparling cast forth from the midst of the congregation, before the doorkeepers became efficient in penetrating her disguise. The third time Mr. Trimblerigg, losing his temper, had used what sounded like incitement to violence, and Miss Sparling getting her leg broken, brought an action and obtained damages, fifty pounds.
This was regarded by the movement as a great spiritual victory, and a victory it was. The law of the land, finding that True Believers had no fixed ritual of public worship, and that male members of its congregations might preach or pray without comment when the spirit moved them, acquitted Miss Sparling either of brawling or of conduct conducive to a breach of the peace, and held responsible for the damage those who had so ruthlessly ejected her. It admitted, however, that they would be within their rights in keeping her out. This for the future they did, and when, as her next spiritual exercise, Miss Sparling returned and broke all the chapel windows as a way of joining in worship, they got her sent to prison for it. There, still led by the spirit, she hunger-struck and got out again; just too late unfortunately to hear Mr. Trimblerigg deliver his sensational discourse to the Annual Congress, a discourse to the force of which she had, without knowing it, contributed: for six months of the women’s Church Militancy had been enough to convince Mr. Trimblerigg that a connection in which they had become active was one from which he himself must sever.
And so, on the opening day of Congress, setting the note for all that was to follow, Mr. Trimblerigg delivered his mercurial and magnetic address on ‘The Weight of Testimony.’ Therein he upheld without a quiver of doubt the verbal inspiration of Scripture; it was, he argued, the true and literal setting forth of things actually said and done by a chosen people finding their spiritual way and losing it; but in that to-and-fro history of loss and gain many things were recorded for our learning upon the sole testimony of men whose minds still stumbled in darkness, and who, therefore, had not the whole truth in them; but where their fallible testimony infallibly recorded by Scripture actually began, or where it ended, was not a matter of inspiration at all but of textual criticism, because in ancient Hebrew manuscripts quotation marks were left out. Thus Holy Scripture, once written, had become subject to vicissitudes at the hands of expurgators, emendators, and copyists, even as the sacred ark of the Covenant which, having at one time fallen into the hands of the Philistines, and at another been desecrated by the polluting touch of Uzzah, was finally carried away in triumph to pagan Rome, and there lost.
Having thus shown how the most sacred receptacles of the Divine purpose were not immune from the accidents of time, he drew and extended his parallel, and from this, his main thesis, proceeded to give instances, and to restore quotation marks as an indication of where textual criticism might be said to begin and inspiration to end.
Before long holy fear like a fluttered dove fleeing from a hawk had entered that assembly, and beards had begun to shake with apprehension as to what might come next.
Mr. Trimblerigg warmed to his work; his sensations were those of a fireman who, in order to display his courage and efficiency in the fighting of flames, has set a light to his own fire-station; and while it crackles under his feet, he strikes an attitude, directs his hose and pours out a flood of salvation.
When he started to give his instances, their devastating effect was all that he could desire. He tackled Joshua’s command to the sun to stand still, restored the quotation marks, pointed out how in that instance Holy Scripture had expressly referred it back to its only authority, the Book of Jassher: and how the Book of Jassher being outside the canon of Scripture was of no standing to impose its poetic legends on the mind of a True Believer. Why then, it might be asked, had reference been made to it at all? He adumbrated a prophetic significance, a spiritual value, to which by that parable the human race was afterwards to attain.
Joshua’s command to the sun now found its true address in the human heart, and the reason why Scripture had recorded it at so early a date was in order that it might find fulfilment and illustration in that greater Scripture uttered upwards of a thousand years later by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians, ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.’ That was the true meaning of Joshua’s command for those who read Scripture, not by picking at it in parts, but by reading it as it ought to be read as one great harmonious, consistent, homogeneous, and indivisible whole.
On that uplifting string of adjectives Mr. Trimblerigg stopped to breathe, and his hearers breathed with him loud and deep.