_The Beard of the Prophet_
Uncle Phineas, the uncle of Mr. Trimblerigg’s father, lived at an
elevation, both physical and spiritual, among the stone quarries a-top
of the village. His house and the chapel where he ministered stood
adjoining, both of his own building; and in the days when Jonathan
knew him he was seldom seen leaving the one except to go to the other.
For he was now very old, and having made his money and retired from
business, he had only one interest left in life, the preaching of
the strict tenets of True Belief to the small congregation which had
trickled under him for the last fifty years.
The True Believers had a worship which was all their own; they flocked
by themselves, never going elsewhere, though others sometimes came to
them. No instrument of music was allowed within their dwelling, nor did
they sing--anything that could be called a tune. When their voices were
lifted in praise they bleated upon a single note, which now and again
they changed, going higher and higher, and when they could go no higher
they stopped.
To our own Mr. Trimblerigg this form of worship was terrible; he liked
music and he liked tunes; diversity attracted him; and here, by every
possible device, diversity was ruled out. But the importance of Uncle
Phineas, both present and prospective, obliged certain members of
the Trimblerigg family to ascend once at least every Sunday, to hear
him preach and pray, and though none of them professed an exclusive
conversion to the teaching of the True Believers, they kept an open
mind about it, and listened respectfully to all that Uncle Phineas had
to say.
Lay-preaching and the ministry of the Word ran strong in the
Trimblerigg family, also in that of the Hubbacks, to which on his
mother’s side Jonathan belonged; and had he cared to divide himself
spiritually among his relations there were five sects from which to
choose--a division of creeds which did not amount to much, except
in the case of the True Believers. Grandfather Hubback, between
whom and Uncle Phineas there was theological war, ministered to
the Free Evangelicals at the Bethesda which Jonathan had helped to
renovate; Uncle James was a Primitive Brother; Uncle Jonah a First
Resurrectionist; his Sunday exercise--the practising of the Last
Trump--a welcome relief perhaps, from his weekday occupation of
undertaker. Mr. Trimblerigg, during his childhood, had sat under all
of them; the difference being that under his Uncle Phineas he had been
made to sit. Then came the question of his own call to the ministry,
and the further question as to ways and means. It was from then on that
Mr. Trimblerigg went more constantly and willingly to hear the doctrine
of the True Believers, and began to display towards it something wider
than an open mind. At the age of fifteen he had got into the habit of
going to see and hear his uncle on weekdays as well, and very quietly
he would endure for hours together while the old man expounded his
unchangeable theology.
Everything about Uncle Phineas was long, including his discourses. He
had a long head, a long nose, a long upper lip and a long chin. To
these his beard served as a corrective; long also, it stuck out at
right angles from his face, till with the weight of its projection it
began to droop; at that point he trimmed it hard and square, making no
compromise, and if none admired it except its owner, it was at least
in character. With such a beard you could not kiss people, and Phineas
Trimblerigg was not of a mind to kiss anybody. In spite of old age, it
retained a hue which suggested a too hasty breakfast of under-boiled
egg; while trying to become grey it remained reminiscently golden.
And the beard symbolized the man; square, blunt and upright,
patriarchal in mind and character, he lived in a golden age of the
past--the age of romantic theology before science had come to disturb
it. His only Tree of Knowledge was the Bible, and this not only in
matters of doctrine; it was his tree of genealogy and history as
well. From its topmost branch he surveyed a world six thousand years
old, of six days making, and all the wonders that followed,--the
Flood, the Tower whose height had threatened Heaven, and the plagues,
pestilences and famines, loosed by an outraged Deity on a stubborn but
chosen people, and the sun and the moon which stood still to assist
in tribal slaughter, and the special vehicles provided for prophets,
at one time a chariot of fire, at another a great fish, at another a
talking ass,--all these things gave him no mental trouble whatever;
but joy rather, and confidence, and an abiding faith. He believed them
literally, and had required that his family should believe them too.
And truly he could say that, in one way or another, he had to begin
with made them all God-fearing. If in the process five had died young,
and one run away to sea and got drowned, and another fallen into evil
courses from which he had not returned alive, so that Phineas in his
old age was left childless--all this had but made him more patriarchal
in outlook than ever, turning his attention upon nephews and nieces
of the second generation, especially upon one; which, indeed, is the
reason why here he becomes an important character.
Fortified by fifty years of prudent investment based upon revelation,
and with a comfortable balance at his bank, he cast his other cares
upon the Lord; lived frugally, gave a just tithe of all he possessed to
the foreign and home missions of the True Believers, drank no wine or
strong drink--except tea, denounced the smoking of tobacco, but took
it as snuff, believed firmly in Hell, war, and corporal punishment
for men, women and children alike, was still an elected, though a
non-attending, member of all local bodies, but in the parliamentary
election (regarding it as the evil thing) would take no part. To him
life, in the main, meant theology.
At the now sharply dividing ways he stood with old Pastor Hubback (or
rather against him) a leading and a rival light among the local Free
Churches; and because he had money to give and to leave he was still a
power in the district as well as in his own family. This was the oracle
to which Mr. Trimblerigg, in his fifteenth year, began to give up his
half-holidays.
Uncle Phineas was always at home; he had legs which never allowed him
to get farther than his own gate, except once a week to the Tabernacle
of True Belief, of which he was minister and owner. The larger chapel
in the village lower down had not known him for thirty years when the
youthful Jonathan first became aware of his importance, and began under
parental direction to pay a weekly call at ‘Pisgah,’ and there learn
from the old patriarch things about himself and others, including God,
to which he listened with an air of great respect and interest.
Jonathan’s way with him was wily but simple: he would ask a great
number of intelligent questions, and receiving unintelligent answers
would appear satisfied. Now and then, upon his birthday, or when
revivalism was in the air, the old man would give him sixpence,
sometimes even a shilling, advising him to bestow it upon the foreign
missions of the stricter Evangelicals, especially those to the native
races of Central Africa and America, where the undiluted truth of the
Word had still necessarily to be taught. For those primitive minds the
taint of modernism had no effect; Heaven had so shaped them to the
divine purpose that nothing short of literal True Belief could touch
their hearts and soften their understandings. And the old man would
talk wondrously to Jonathan of how, in the evil days to come, these
black races were destined to become the repository of the true faith
and reconvert the world to the purer doctrine.
Uncle Phineas was on the look-out for punishment on a world-wide scale,
and had he lived to see it, the War of Versailles would have gladdened
his heart. For he wanted all the Nations to be punished, including his
own,--a point on which Mr. Trimblerigg ventured privately to differ
from him; being in that matter a Free Evangelical, and preferring
Heaven to Hell. Uncle Phineas preferred Hell; punishment was owing, and
the imaginary infliction of it was what in the main attracted him to
religion.
Punishment: first and foremost for man’s breaking of the Sabbath;
then followed in order drink, horse-racing, gambling, the increase of
divorces, modernism, and the higher criticism, with all its resultant
forms of infidelity, the agitation for Women’s Suffrage, and finally
the impious attempt of Labour to depose Capital.
All these things were of the Devil and must be fought; and in the
discussion of them Jonathan began--not to be in a difficulty because
some of them made an appeal to his dawning intelligence, but to become
agile. Luckily for him Uncle Phineas’s information was very nearly
as narrow as his intelligence, and Mr. Trimblerigg was able to jump
to and fro across his sedentary and parochial mind with small fear
of discovery. But the repeated interviews made him brisk, supple,
and conversationally adaptable; and once when the old man remarked
half-approvingly, ‘Aye, Jonathan, you’ve got eyes in your head, but
don’t let ’em out by the back door,’ he had a momentary qualm lest
behind that observation dangerous knowledge might lurk.
But it was only his uncle’s constitutional disapproval of a mind that
could move; and of Jonathan’s outside doings and opinions he had at
that time heard nothing to rouse suspicion. But clearly when Mr.
Trimblerigg was called to the ministry and began to preach there would
be a difficulty; for what would go down at Bethesda among the Free
Evangelicals, where his obvious career was awaiting him, would not do
up at Horeb, the chapel on the hill; and it was well within the bounds
of possibility that owing to his family connections Mr. Trimblerigg
might find it advantageous to preach at both.
That, however, was a problem still lying some few years away; meanwhile
Uncle Phineas might very reasonably die; and it was just about this
time that I heard Mr. Trimblerigg beginning to pray for peace to the
old man in his declining years, that he might not be kept unduly on the
rack of this tough world after so good a life.
And indeed it was a life in which he had accomplished much; for a
man of his small beginnings he had become of notable substance, and
his income derived from quarries and the houses he had built for his
workers was reckoned to amount to anything from six to eight hundred a
year, of which, in spite of generous gifts to foreign missions, he did
not spend one-half.
His expectant relatives did not talk among themselves about the matter
where, of necessity, interests were divided; but they thought much, and
occasionally they had their fears.
‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Jonathan’s father one day, ‘if when Uncle
dies it isn’t found that he had an unsound mind.’
It was to obviate such a calamity that Jonathan was sent to pay his
weekly visit, and that one or another of the family, at least once
every Sunday, went up to Horeb to pray.
Quite early in his examination of the tenets of True Belief, anxious
that she should keep him in countenance, Mr. Trimblerigg asked Davidina
what she thought of them.
‘My belief is,’ said Davidina, ‘that we can all believe what we want
to believe; and if you only believe it enough, it comes true--for you,
at any rate. You can believe every word of the Bible is true, or that
every word of it is false; and either way, you can live up to it. The
True Believers are right there, anyway. And if,’ she added, ‘you’ve got
nothing else to believe, you can believe in yourself: and you can smile
at yourself in the glass, and look at your teeth, and think they are
milestones on the road to Heaven, till they all drop out. Believing’s
easy; it’s choosing what you mean to believe that matters. I believe
the kettle’s boiling over.’
She went, leaving Mr. Trimblerigg to his meditations, also to a doubt
whether she had taken him quite seriously.
With his Uncle Phineas it was all the other way; they were nothing if
not serious together; but it often puzzled his ingenuous mind how his
uncle managed to believe all the things he did.
One day: ‘Uncle Phineas,’ he said, ‘how did you come to be a True
Believer?’
‘When I felt the need of conversion as a young man,’ replied Uncle
Phineas, ‘I started reading the Scriptures. Every day, before I opened
the book, I said, “Lord, help me to believe!” And by the time I’d read
’em three times through, I believed every word.’
‘I’ve only read them twice yet,’ said Jonathan in meek admission, but
glad to get hold of the excuse.
‘Read ’em again,’ said his uncle.
‘And all the genealogies, too, Uncle?’ he inquired, for all the world
as though he felt genuinely committed to the task if the other should
say ‘yes.’
‘Why would you leave them out?’ queried his uncle. ‘It’s the sowing of
the seed. When you sow a field, you’ve not to care about this grain or
that, picking and choosing: it’s the sowing that matters. Sow your mind
with the seed of the Word, and don’t leave gaps. You never know how you
may come to need it hereafter. “Abram begat Isaac; and Isaac married
Rebecca, and begat Jacob:”--that was the text the Lord showed me when
He would have me choose a wife, whose name was Rebecca.’ He fetched a
sigh. ‘And I did,’ he said. ‘She was a poor weak wife to me, and the
children took after her; so now not one of them is left. It was the
Lord’s will.’
‘But if you had married some one else, wouldn’t it have been the Lord’s
will too?’ inquired Jonathan.
‘That we won’t discuss,’ said his uncle. ‘I shouldn’t have chosen
without first looking to Scripture. There was only one Rebecca in the
village, and I hadn’t thought of her till then. ’Twas a marvellous
showing, and she on a bed of sickness at the time.’
Mr. Trimblerigg was properly impressed; but he doubted whether he would
choose his own wife that way, even should he become a True Believer.
So, not to linger on doubtful ground, he changed the subject and
began to ask about missionaries; having a wish to see the world, they
attracted him.
‘If I become a True Believer,’ he said, ‘I shan’t stay and preach in
one place; I shall go out and preach everywhere.’
‘You’ll do as the Lord tells you,’ said his uncle. ‘It’s no good one
that’s not a True Believer talking of what he’ll do when he becomes
one.’
‘No, Uncle,’ said Jonathan meekly, still out to do business; ‘but
living at home makes it very hard for me. I’m much nearer to being a
True Believer than Mother is, or Father, or Davidina. Davidina says you
can believe anything if you’ll only make yourself. She says she could
make herself believe that the Bible was all false, if she were to try.’
‘Has she tried, does she mean?’ inquired Uncle Phineas grimly.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Jonathan ingenuously. ‘It would be very wicked
if anyone did try, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would,’ said his uncle. ‘I’ve known men struck down dead for less.
I knew a man once who tore a leaf out of his Bible to light his pipe
with, and he was struck by lightning for it the same day. Yet his sin
was only against one leaf, one chapter. How much greater the sin if you
sin against the whole of it. She thought that, did she? When you go
home, send Davidina up to me: I’ll talk to her.’
Then Mr. Trimblerigg had a divided mind; for his fear of Davidina was
not less but rather more than his fear of Uncle Phineas. Indeed he only
feared Uncle Phineas for what he might fail to do for him in the near
future, but Davidina he feared for what she was, here and now.
‘I think, perhaps, Davidina only meant--anybody who was wicked enough.
But please don’t tell Davidina that I said anything!’
‘Heh?’ cried Uncle Phineas, his eye suspicious: ‘That so? We’ll see.’
He got up, went slowly to his Bible and opened it and without looking
put down his thumb.
‘Listen to this, Jonathan,’ he said; and in solemn tone and with long
pauses, he read:
“She put her hand to the nail ... and her right hand to the workman’s
hammer ... and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his head
... when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.”... You hear
that, Jonathan?’
‘Yes, Uncle,’ he replied, not yet understanding the application of the
text.
‘You see, Jonathan,’ said his uncle, ‘Davidina was getting at you.’
Being a True Believer’s interpretation, it was not open to discussion,
not for Jonathan at any rate. Uncle Phineas was a mighty hunter of the
Scriptures before the Lord: the true interpretation never escaped him.
It was a curious and unexplained fact that Davidina was a great
favourite of Uncle Phineas, so far as one so entirely without affection
could be said to have favourites. Davidina was far from being a True
Believer, yet he trusted her; and he did not yet quite trust Jonathan.
But he saw well enough that Jonathan had in him the makings of a
prophet and of a preacher; if only he could trust him, he would help
him to go far. But the testing process took time.
So, day by day, Mr. Trimblerigg laboured to win his trust, and
often, after long hours of boredom in his uncle’s company, success
seemed near; for intellectually he was now growing fast, and to the
cultivation of an agile brain added the cultivation of a wily tongue,
and even where his future career did not depend upon it he loved to
sustain an argument.
But he never got the better of Uncle Phineas; for when Phineas could
not answer him, the Book did. He began to loathe the Book--that
particular copy of it, I mean--and to make faces at it behind his
uncle’s back. But a day came when he loved it like a brother.
At the right time for the forwarding of his plans, Mr. Trimblerigg
professed a desire for larger book-learning; he wanted to study
theology, and that not from one point of view alone. Ready to satisfy
him, up to a point, Uncle Phineas plied him with books containing the
true doctrine, some he would make him sit down and read aloud upon the
spot while he expounded them; others he let him take away to study and
return, questioning him closely thereafter to discover how well he had
read them. They were all good books--good in the moral sense, that
is to say--books written to inculcate the principles of True Belief;
but all, from the contemporary point of view utterly useless, and all
deadly dull.
One day Mr. Trimblerigg asked his uncle, ‘Where all the other books
were--the bad ones, which taught false doctrine.’
Why did he want to know? inquired Uncle Phineas.
‘I want to read them,’ said Jonathan greatly daring. ‘If one doesn’t
read them, how is one to know how to answer them? I want to read them
because they deceive people.’
‘Not True Believers,’ said his uncle.
‘No,’ replied Jonathan, ‘but people who might become True Believers.’
‘They should read their Bibles. There you find the answer to
everything.’
‘Yes. So I did; I did it last night as I was going to bed: I opened
it, just as you do, Uncle, and there it was--written: the thing I was
wanting to know.’
‘What was it?’
‘It was this, Uncle: “Oh, that mine adversary had written a book.
Surely I would take it upon my shoulder and bind it as a crown unto
me.”’
‘That doesn’t say read it,’ objected his uncle.
‘No, but it means it. It means that if wicked books are written we’ve
got to do with them, we’ve not just got to let them alone.’
‘We’ll see,’ replied the other; ‘we’ll ask the Lord to show us.’ He got
the Book and opened it. ‘There, Jonathan, listen to this:
‘“What profiteth the graven image that the maker thereof hath graven
it; the molten image, the teacher of lies, that the maker of his work
trusteth therein to make dumb idols” ... God’s answered you, Jonathan.’
‘But that’s about the man who wrote it,’ objected Jonathan. ‘He trusts
in his work, but I don’t; he’s not going to make a dumb idol of me.’
‘You’re running your head into danger, Jonathan. If you are not a True
Believer, the Book may be only a trap set for you by the Devil. He can
quote Scripture when it suits him, as well as any.’
‘But I prayed first,’ said Jonathan. ‘And I’m trying to become a True
Believer.’
‘When you’ve become a True Believer, we’ll talk about it,’ said his
uncle.
After that for a whole week his uncle saw no more of him. Then one day,
waking up from his afternoon nap, the old man found Jonathan sitting
and looking at him.
It was quite five minutes since Jonathan had crept in, and during
that time he had not been idle. He had gone to the Book, and arranged
a marker, and three and four times he had opened and without looking
had put his finger to the exact place; just a finger’s length from the
bottom on the right-hand side, it was easy to find. Then, sitting far
away from the Book, he had waited for his uncle to wake.
He did not allow the haze of sleep to disperse before he made his
announcement.
‘Uncle,’ he said, ‘I’ve become a True Believer. I’ve had a call: God
has shown me the way.’
‘How do you know you’re a True Believer?’ questioned the old man
cautiously.
‘I’ve His Word for it. Every time I open the Book it speaks to me--so
plain, that at first it frightened me. Then I felt a great joy and a
light filling me. And everything in the world is different to what it
was.’
‘Aye,’ replied his uncle, ‘that sounds the real thing. What has He
called you to do?’
‘To go out and preach, Uncle. And He’s told me I’m to go to college.’
‘How has He told you that?’ inquired Phineas, sceptical again.
‘I asked Him to show me what I was to do, where I was to go; I opened
the Book and put my finger on the page; and there--college was the very
word!’
‘You tell me that you found the word “college” in the Bible?’ inquired
his uncle incredulously.
‘It was found for me,’ said Jonathan: ‘Hilkiah the priest, and Achbor,
and Shaphan, went unto Huldah the prophetess, the wife of Shallum; and
she dwelt in Jerusalem in the college; and they communed with her.’
So, by the mouth of his nephew, Phineas stood corrected in his
knowledge of the Scriptures. But he did not quite yield yet. ‘Fetch me
the Book, Jonathan,’ he said.
‘No, Uncle,’ replied his nephew, ‘the Lord is calling to me now, not to
you. This is my affair.’
And so saying he opened the Book, drew out the marker, and set his
finger upon the page. Then he brought it across to his uncle. ‘You read
it, Uncle,’ he said; and his uncle read: ‘Arise, go unto Nineveh, that
great city, and preach unto it the preaching that I bid thee.’
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.