CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Spade Work
THE free evangelicals had long been honourably known for the extent and zeal of their labours in the mission field. In Africa, in the larger islands of the Pacific, and elsewhere, there were whole tracts from which their spiritual competitors were cut out—districts of which they had a practical monopoly. But in others, of recent years, the monopoly had broken down.
Mr. Trimblerigg, with his shrewd eye for business, investigated the cause, and found it. He discovered that a gospel-teaching which would not go down in the modern world of civilization was the most successful, being the most convincing, among the primitive races. And though the missions of True Belief had everywhere dwindled for lack of funds, they had nevertheless left their doctrines so firmly rooted among certain tribes that those coming after had found it advisable to take them over without much change or enlargement of view. For the coloured races a form of faith divorced from reason was for practical purposes the best. And so it became Mr. Trimblerigg’s work to persuade into the mission field such minds among the Free Evangelicals as tended most nearly to the doctrines of True Belief, and to head off as unsuitable those of a more modernist tendency who were better suited at home. And when, as sometimes happened, there was doctrinal war among the missionaries themselves, Mr. Trimblerigg’s influence was always subtly on the side of those who preached, as the true word of revelation, those things which the natives accepted most easily and liked best.
It was a point of view for which there is much to be said; for the knowledge which comes to man mainly through his five senses, and which has similarly to be passed on to others, cannot in the nature of things be absolute knowledge; and directly that is granted and given due weight, knowledge, even of things spiritual, has to adapt itself to forms which bear a sort of proportion to the minds waiting to receive it. And so under the stimulus of reports brought back from the mission field, Mr. Trimblerigg developed his doctrinal thesis that truth is but relative, thus anticipating in the spiritual world the discovery of Einstein in the material.
It was a thesis which when first put forward provoked a great deal of controversy; and many of the older school, for whose larger influence in the mission field it had been practically designed, denounced it in unmeasured terms as incompatible with Revelation and dangerous to the integrity of the human conscience.
But it was such a convenient doctrine—especially for the establishment of a modus vivendi among missionaries—that it made its way; and within ten years of Mr. Trimblerigg’s first lubricating touch to the machinery put in his charge, the Free Evangelicals had redoubled their efficiency in the old world and the new, by setting forth the evidences of religion on two entirely different and incompatible lines, and producing as a result forms of faith as diverse in complexion as were the black and white faces of the respective communities to which essential truth was thus made relative.
As a further result Mr. Trimblerigg brought about, more by accident than by design, an informal alliance in missionary effort between True Believers and Free Evangelicals. For out there in the mission fields True Belief was now having won for it the battle which at home it had lost; and by a strange irony the man most responsible for that turn in its fortunes was he who, once its rising hope, had been so uncompromisingly cast forth for a too-relative adherence to revealed Truth.
One day word was brought to Mr. Trimblerigg that certain elders of True Belief had been of a mind to search the Scriptures concerning him: and the word had come, not inappositely—though open to different shades of interpretation: ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters, and after many days it shall return to thee.’ And it was reported that the said elders had been impressed and had made a note of it.
Mr. Trimblerigg was pleased by the news, for it meant that a door still stood open; and though he had no intention of passing through it again, he liked it to be open. For he was now busy opening a door to them; and theirs being open in return, they might eventually pass through it to him. The idea of relegating the mission field definitely to True Belief under an agreed coalition of the Churches began to attract him, for it was becoming clear to him that among the mentally deficient True Belief was the quickest and most effective way to conversion, if only it could be made non-sectarian—a means rather than an end. He saw, with speculative instinct that looked like faith, how a place might be found for all on a plan of his own making. Thus the great fusion of the Free Churches toward which he was working came a step nearer to practical politics.
His work being the organization of missions, it was often his duty to entertain missionaries. And as the best time of all, for establishing confidential relations, was to meet them in friendly intimacy immediately upon their arrival, it was beginning to be his practice to invite as guest to his house any prominent missionary who had come home on leave. Thus in the course of a few years the very cream of the Free Evangelical mission world, and a few others from connections that were friendly, passed through his hands.