This was regarded by the movement as a great spiritual victory, and a victory it was. The law of the land, finding that True Believers had no fixed ritual of public worship, and that male members of its congregations might preach or pray without comment when the spirit moved them, acquitted Miss Sparling either of brawling or of conduct conducive to a breach of the peace, and held responsible for the damage those who had so ruthlessly ejected her. It admitted, however, that they would be within their rights in keeping her out. This for the future they did, and when, as her next spiritual exercise, Miss Sparling returned and broke all the chapel windows as a way of joining in worship, they got her sent to prison for it. There, still led by the spirit, she hunger-struck and got out again; just too late unfortunately to hear Mr. Trimblerigg deliver his sensational discourse to the Annual Congress, a discourse to the force of which she had, without knowing it, contributed: for six months of the women’s Church Militancy had been enough to convince Mr. Trimblerigg that a connection in which they had become active was one from which he himself must sever. And so, on the opening day of Congress, setting the note for all that was to follow, Mr. Trimblerigg delivered his mercurial and magnetic address on ‘The Weight of Testimony.’ Therein he upheld without a quiver of doubt the verbal inspiration of Scripture; it was, he argued, the true and literal setting forth of things actually said and done by a chosen people finding their spiritual way and losing it; but in that to-and-fro history of loss and gain many things were recorded for our learning upon the sole testimony of men whose minds still stumbled in darkness, and who, therefore, had not the whole truth in them; but where their fallible testimony infallibly recorded by Scripture actually began, or where it ended, was not a matter of inspiration at all but of textual criticism, because in ancient Hebrew manuscripts quotation marks were left out. Thus Holy Scripture, once written, had become subject to vicissitudes at the hands of expurgators, emendators, and copyists, even as the sacred ark of the Covenant which, having at one time fallen into the hands of the Philistines, and at another been desecrated by the polluting touch of Uzzah, was finally carried away in triumph to pagan Rome, and there lost. Having thus shown how the most sacred receptacles of the Divine purpose were not immune from the accidents of time, he drew and extended his parallel, and from this, his main thesis, proceeded to give instances, and to restore quotation marks as an indication of where textual criticism might be said to begin and inspiration to end. Before long holy fear like a fluttered dove fleeing from a hawk had entered that assembly, and beards had begun to shake with apprehension as to what might come next.