‘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. CHAPTER FIVE _The Moving Spirit_ So Mr. Trimblerigg went to college to learn tribal divinity as falsely taught by the Free Evangelicals; and his Uncle Phineas paid for it. He went there as a True Believer; and his fellow-students viewed with wonder so coming-on a disposition confined to so strait and narrow an interpretation of things spiritual. For at that time a great wave of Liberalism had entered the larger bodies of the Free Church Movement, and the Free Evangelicals led the way. They had even gone so far as to admit women students to their University and to its theological studies, though not of course to the ministry; and because of this and similar tendencies, the wider and easier interpretation of Scripture concerned them greatly. In this large and tolerant atmosphere, where modernism was beginning to lift its head, Mr. Trimblerigg stood all alone. It was a challenge that delighted him. He had no illusions as to the lack of a future outlook afforded by adherence to the strict tenets of True Belief: but he had the sense to realize that what a student believes, or thinks he believes, in his teens under the unavoidable influence of the parental upbringing, matters nothing to his future career. Only when he comes to man’s estate, and the full and free possession of his faculties do his opinions and pronouncements begin to measure his qualification for advancement. In the meantime he could sharpen his wits, acquire knowledge, and develop his resources for dialectic and for oratory just as well by maintaining the improbable side of the argument as the probable; what better test indeed for his powers? Convictions could come later, what he wanted now was training; and though as yet unconvinced himself, he might on the way convince others, if only a few, even of the truth of tenets which he meant presently to discard.