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.