Mr. Trimblerigg, with his shrewd eye for business, investigated the cause, and found it. He discovered that a gospel-teaching which would not go down in the modern world of civilization was the most successful, being the most convincing, among the primitive races. And though the missions of True Belief had everywhere dwindled for lack of funds, they had nevertheless left their doctrines so firmly rooted among certain tribes that those coming after had found it advisable to take them over without much change or enlargement of view. For the coloured races a form of faith divorced from reason was for practical purposes the best. And so it became Mr. Trimblerigg’s work to persuade into the mission field such minds among the Free Evangelicals as tended most nearly to the doctrines of True Belief, and to head off as unsuitable those of a more modernist tendency who were better suited at home. And when, as sometimes happened, there was doctrinal war among the missionaries themselves, Mr. Trimblerigg’s influence was always subtly on the side of those who preached, as the true word of revelation, those things which the natives accepted most easily and liked best. It was a point of view for which there is much to be said; for the knowledge which comes to man mainly through his five senses, and which has similarly to be passed on to others, cannot in the nature of things be absolute knowledge; and directly that is granted and given due weight, knowledge, even of things spiritual, has to adapt itself to forms which bear a sort of proportion to the minds waiting to receive it. And so under the stimulus of reports brought back from the mission field, Mr. Trimblerigg developed his doctrinal thesis that truth is but relative, thus anticipating in the spiritual world the discovery of Einstein in the material. It was a thesis which when first put forward provoked a great deal of controversy; and many of the older school, for whose larger influence in the mission field it had been practically designed, denounced it in unmeasured terms as incompatible with Revelation and dangerous to the integrity of the human conscience. But it was such a convenient doctrine--especially for the establishment of a _modus vivendi_ among missionaries--that it made its way; and within ten years of Mr. Trimblerigg’s first lubricating touch to the machinery put in his charge, the Free Evangelicals had redoubled their efficiency in the old world and the new, by setting forth the evidences of religion on two entirely different and incompatible lines, and producing as a result forms of faith as diverse in complexion as were the black and white faces of the respective communities to which essential truth was thus made relative.