Mr. Trimblerigg warmed to his work; his sensations were those of a fireman who, in order to display his courage and efficiency in the fighting of flames, has set a light to his own fire-station; and while it crackles under his feet, he strikes an attitude, directs his hose and pours out a flood of salvation. When he started to give his instances, their devastating effect was all that he could desire. He tackled Joshua’s command to the sun to stand still, restored the quotation marks, pointed out how in that instance Holy Scripture had expressly referred it back to its only authority, the Book of Jassher: and how the Book of Jassher being outside the canon of Scripture was of no standing to impose its poetic legends on the mind of a True Believer. Why then, it might be asked, had reference been made to it at all? He adumbrated a prophetic significance, a spiritual value, to which by that parable the human race was afterwards to attain. Joshua’s command to the sun now found its true address in the human heart, and the reason why Scripture had recorded it at so early a date was in order that it might find fulfilment and illustration in that greater Scripture uttered upwards of a thousand years later by St. Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians, ‘Let not the sun go down upon your wrath.’ That was the true meaning of Joshua’s command for those who read Scripture, not by picking at it in parts, but by reading it as it ought to be read as one great harmonious, consistent, homogeneous, and indivisible whole. On that uplifting string of adjectives Mr. Trimblerigg stopped to breathe, and his hearers breathed with him loud and deep. That answering sound, whatever it might mean, gave Mr. Trimblerigg the poetic push which the gasp of a listening audience always supplied, ‘Yea, I say unto you, yea!’ he cried, and paused. He was in deep waters, he knew; so, breaking into an eloquent passage about ships--ships at sea, ships that pass in the night, ships that have Jonahs on board, ships that cling to the anchor, and ships that have no anchor wherewith to cling, ships of the desert seeking for water and finding none, ships that making for the North Pole stick fast in ice, yet continue moving toward their destined goal, ships that go out like ravens and return no more, ships that come home like doves to roost carrying their sheaves with them--so experimenting on wings of poesy in that seaward direction to which, though he had never been there, his pulpit oratory so often carried him, he almost succeeded, or almost seemed to succeed, in carrying his audience with him; for indeed it is very difficult, when beautiful spiritual similes are being uttered, for an audience to remain cold and critical, and remind itself that figures of speech have nothing to do with sound doctrine.