_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.
It was from one of these latter that Mr. Trimblerigg received news of
the swift civilization that was taking place in parts scarcely heard
of as yet, owing to the beneficent efforts of certain missionary
centres not only to sow the seed of the faith but to develop the wealth
and resources of the fields in which they laboured. This particular
missioner was an optimist about his own districts. ‘In fifty years’
time,’ he said, ‘it will be for its size, the richest country outside
Europe and the States.’ And as its size was nearly half that of France
such a forecast suggested big possibilities.
He went on to tell with what prudent and fatherly care those in control
of the missions had headed off the rapacious traders and concession
hunters, who follow in the missionary’s track, by obtaining from the
native chiefs exclusive rights strategically based upon the routes
of trade, such for instance as the building of landing-stages at the
junction of rivers, and the setting up of white settlements on the high
table-lands of the interior.
As a consequence the economic future of the country was controlled,
not indeed by the missionary society itself, but by a humane-minded
organization of business interests working with and through it. And
under this happy co-operation the Native Industries Company in the Ray
River territory to the north of Puto-Congo (not then the familiar name
it has become since) had opened up commercial relations at the cost of
only a few score thousand pounds, which in the near future might be
worth millions. They were already paying an interest on shares which
compared favourably with larger ventures of longer date; and as the
total number of shares was comparatively small, they offered to early
investors a great future.
And so Mr. Trimblerigg, who had a taste for speculative transfer, sold
out and reinvested a few hundred pounds in Native Industries Limited;
and receiving his dividends thereafter on the scale promised, thought
very little further about it, except as something sound which carried
with it the larger hope of value that might increase.
The sense in which he thought very little about it, was as to the
actual source of its profits--oil, rubber, copra, or ivory--the
methods of its working, and the men who worked it, or what it really
did for the native beyond making him more accessible to the influence
of missions and of trade. As to that last, a very slight preliminary
inquiry had satisfied him that it was so; and there he left it. It
never occurred to Mr. Trimblerigg, who was eloquently opposed to
corporal punishment in his own country for crimes of violence and
such like, to inquire whether corporal punishment played any part in
making his dividends from Native Industries Limited nearer ten than
five per cent per annum. And why indeed should it occur to him? The
shareholder system, on which modern trade is run, does not prompt
such mental occurrence; and where so many millions are satisfied that
their responsibilities end in the acceptance of the reports of their
directors, can any particular blame attach to one, however eminent in
the organization of the mission field, if he also was satisfied, and
become in consequence forgetful?
Mr. Trimblerigg had then--as always--a perfectly clear conscience. He
was very busy, he was doing good work; his doctrine of relative truth
was giving theology a more modern and a much more sensible mind about
all the things it could not really prove but loved to fight about; the
coalition of the Free Churches was advancing under his manipulation
by leaps and bounds; behind that loomed Disestablishment. Given a
greater corporate union of Nonconformity, the argument for it would be
irresistible; and when it came he would be the up-to-date Luther before
whose assault that final stronghold of religious privilege toppled to
ruin. For Mr. Trimblerigg had been busy not only in the organization
of missions but upon the political side also; and would no doubt by
this time have gone into Parliament had not somebody already been there
before him who was doing what he would have done in exactly the same
way--with the same brilliance, the same elasticity, the same eloquence,
the same hand-to-mouth conviction, and the same enthusiastic and
catchword-loving following. Parliament did not need two wizards to cast
upon it the same spell. That was the reason why Mr. Trimblerigg kept
his wizardry for the Churches.
And so, through strenuous years Mr. Trimblerigg laboured to make Free
Evangelicalism greater, and more powerful, and more feared than it had
ever yet been; and before he had touched middle age he began to be
spoken of as candidate for the high office of President at the Annual
Conference--a post for which previously no head without grey hair on it
had ever qualified.
It only wanted some great cause, some big agitation led by himself, to
carry him through and make him, before he reached the age of forty,
the most prominent figure in the Nonconformist world. And then, while
he was looking for it, came, just in the nick of time, the story, the
horrible story of the Puto-Congo atrocities.
He was no missionary and no trader, but a mere outsider who brought it
to Europe; and when, for reasons, Government threw a belittling doubt
upon it, questioning the motives and veracity of its reporter, then Mr.
Trimblerigg saw his chance, and blew a blast to the Free Evangelical
mission world. He took up the cause, made it his own, and gave it all
the publicity it required.