And that is why, while war went on, Mr. Trimblerigg and the rest of the world did not hear of it; or if they heard anything, did not believe what they heard; for that too is one of the conditions that war imposes. Truth, then, becomes more relative than ever; which is one of the reasons why Mr. Trimblerigg was then in his element. But when the war was sufficiently over for intercommunication to re-establish itself, and when the skinning of the scapegoat had become a stale game, and when the hewing of Agag had emphatically not come off, then Mr. Trimblerigg, and others, began to hear of it. It was the others that mattered. Mr. Trimblerigg--his war-mind still upon him, and still suffering from his severe attack of Old Testament--did not believe it; but the others did, and the others were mainly the most active and humanitarian section of the Free Evangelicals. Having already expressed their disapproval of skinning the scapegoat and hewing Agag, even to the extent of pronouncing against it at their first annual conference after the war, they now fastened on the recrudescence of ugly rumours from Puto-Congo and the adjacent territories, and began to hold Mr. Trimblerigg responsible. They had at least this much reason upon their side, that Mr. Trimblerigg was still chairman of the Directors of Native Industries Limited, and, by right of office, sat upon the administrative council of the Chartered Company. And when, as the leakage of news became larger, it seemed that everything he had formerly denounced as an organized atrocity was being, or had but recently been done on a much larger scale by his own commissioners, the cry became uncomfortably loud, and the war-mind, which can manipulate facts to suit its case while they are suppressed by law, began to find itself in difficulties. Mr. Trimblerigg, faced by certified facts which he continued to deny or question, began jumping from the New to the Old Testament and back again with an agility which confused his traducers but did not convince them; and the allegiance of the Free Evangelicals became sharply divided. The reunion of the Free Churches for which Mr. Trimblerigg had so long been working, already adversely affected by the divergencies of the war, was now strained to breaking. On the top of this came the news that the natives of Puto-Congo had risen in revolt and had begun massacring the missionaries, and Free Evangelical opinion became more sharply divided than ever--whether to withdraw the missions and cease to have any further connection with the Chartered Company, or to send out reinforcements, less spiritual and more military, adopt the policy of the firm hand, and restore not liberty but order.