But the time was not yet: the instruction added to his will need not begin to take effect for a good many years. Meanwhile his corner of immortality waited for him, measured by himself to suit his own taste.
It came back to him then as a pleasant simile of fancy, that he had had an uncle who was an undertaker. It ran in the family. Here was Mr. Trimblerigg—his own!
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Peace-Work
TO become the spiritual voice of a nation is a rare experience, and in the history of the race it has come to the individual but seldom. But when it happens, he is a greater power than military leader, or politician, or popular preacher, unless in one man all three functions find themselves combined; then, without much justification in fact, a people may mistake the combination for the more rare and genuine article.
It could not exactly be said of Mr. Trimblerigg at this time that he was a military leader; but the idea had been industriously disseminated, by his admirers and by himself during the war, that had he been he would have been a brilliant one. Nor was he exactly a politician; but he had been very busy and energetic in putting the politicians right, so that, as they went out of favour in public estimation, he came in. For the rest, a popular preacher he was, and a very wonderful one; though it is a curious fact that his sermons and speeches do not read well in print. Mr. Trimblerigg’s orations were gymnastic exercises and histrionic performances combined; and these things lose their effect when reduced to print. Nevertheless he had now become a Voice, and the sound of him travelled wherever his native tongue was spoken, war-conditions having given it an atmosphere that it could fill.
His military instinct he had mainly shown by running about in moments of crisis and pinning his faith to commanders who up till then had escaped defeat. When he found he had made a mistake, he dropped them so quickly that nobody remembered he had ever believed in them; and having thus discovered three or four and lost them again, he finally hit upon the right one. Having done that, he did not allow it to be forgotten, so that the reputation which survived the final and triumphant catastrophe remained partly his.
His political instinct produced more definite and more solid results; he persuaded the politicians to do a lot of things which at other times they would not have dared. Some of these things were not very scrupulous, and others were not very successful; but they were all military necessities, and as only the relative truth was told about them, they took their place in the general scheme of things; and if they did not exactly do good, they were good for the morale of the nation for the time being.
And while he thus persuaded the politicians to do things hitherto impossible for the benefit of the whole nation, he persuaded the Free Evangelicals also; and in his own time and his own way he secured for Isabel Sparling and others the desire of their souls which had been so long denied them. But in that matter, though the thing was done well and quickly when it was done, he missed something of his intended effect from the fact that the whole world was then so busy about war that nothing else seemed much to matter. The sudden admission of women to the ministry appeared then a mere side-issue, an emergency measure devised to meet the shortage of men theologically qualified for the vacant pastorates of congregations abruptly depleted of their young male element. Thus Mr. Trimblerigg’s very real achievement in the pulpiteering of women was regarded, even among the Free Evangelicals, far more as a war-product than as his own.
Also for Isabel Sparling herself, whom he wished to impress, it had ceased much to matter. She had become a Second Adventist; and among the Second Adventists it was admitted that women could prophesy as well as men. Miss Sparling had gone prophesying to America; and had caused a great sensation in New York by prophesying that Brooklyn Bridge had become unsafe, and would fall if America did not enter the war. She gave a date: and America saved Brooklyn Bridge to posterity only just in time. After that the success of Miss Sparling’s American mission was assured; and whenever the States seemed momentarily to slacken in their purpose or diminish in their zeal for the rescue of a civilization they did not understand, Miss Sparling selected some cherished institution or monument, and began threatening its life; and when, after due warning a bomb was discovered inside the statue of Liberty just preparing to go off, she got headlines for Second Adventism which had never been equalled since Barnum’s landing of Jumbo (representative of a still older civilization than that which was now imperilled) some forty years before.
All this is told here merely to indicate what a match to himself Mr. Trimblerigg had missed by not marrying Isabel Sparling in the days of his youth. Had they only put their heads together earlier, kingdoms might have come of which the world has now missed its chance—not knowing what it has missed; for there can be no doubt that its spiritual adhesions are not now what they were ten years ago; the pulpit has sagged a little on its foundations and congregations have become critical, sceptical even, though they still attend. The doctrine of Relative Truth has undone more than it intended; and though Mr. Trimblerigg was not a disappointed man at the moment when war declared itself over, disappointment was waiting him.