It is also difficult when a speaker speaks with so much beauty and fervour and imaginative mimicry, as on this occasion did Mr. Trimblerigg, not to see him as he sees himself; for the self-hypnotism of the orator is a catching thing--and nations have often been caught by it to their destruction, and churches to heresy almost before they knew. But the True Believers, though momentarily moved, were not carried away; and when Mr. Trimblerigg returned to his instances his audience was still against him. He took the characters of the Hebrew prophets and examined them; he showed that the sins and shortcomings of Eli’s judgeship, for which Eli had been condemned, were reproduced under the judgeship of Samuel when he, in his turn, grew old, and that it was really only as Samuel’s own word for it that the people stood condemned in asking for a King. Holy Scripture had truly recorded that incident; but was Samuel, the ineffective ruler whose sons took bribes and perverted judgment, was he a witness altogether above suspicion when his own deposition from power was the question to be decided on? And so round the testimony of Samuel he put quotation marks, and relieved Scripture of the burden of that unjust judgment the approval of which was Samuel’s, and Samuel’s alone. And then he took Elisha and the cursing of the children, and the she-bears tearing of them, and there, too, he restored the quotation marks. He threw no doubt upon the incident, but its reading as a moral emblem was the reading of Elisha, and the tearing of the forty-two children had found its interpretation in the wish of the prophet misreading it as the will of God. Other instances followed: there with the testimony of Scripture before him, stood Mr. Trimblerigg inserting quotation marks for the restoration of its morals, dividing the sheep from the goats, trying to show where inspiration ended and where textual criticism began. Judged by outside standards it was not a learned discourse, even Mr. Trimblerigg would not have claimed that for it; but it was vivacious and eloquent, and not lacking in common sense; and as common sense was preeminently the quality for which in relation to the interpretation of Scripture the True Believers had no use, the result was a foregone conclusion. When he had finished Mr. Trimblerigg sat down to a dead silence, and the presiding minister rose. Deeply, bitterly, unsparingly Mr. Trimblerigg’s thesis was there and then condemned as utterly subversive of the revealed Word. More than that, Congress by a unanimous vote expunged it from the record of its proceedings; not by the most diligent search in the archives of True Belief will any reference to Mr. Trimblerigg’s address on ‘the Weight of Testimony’ be found. But the discourse had done its work, and Mr. Trimblerigg knew that he left the Congress theologically free for the new-shaping of his career.