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.’