CHAPTER FOURTEENSpade Work
THE free evangelicals had long been honourably known for the extent and zeal of their labours in the mission field. In Africa, in the larger islands of the Pacific, and elsewhere, there were whole tracts from which their spiritual competitors were cut out—districts of which they had a practical monopoly. But in others, of recent years, the monopoly had broken down.
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 throughhis 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 amodus vivendiamong 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.
As a further result Mr. Trimblerigg brought about, more by accident than by design, an informal alliance in missionary effort between True Believers and Free Evangelicals. For out there in the mission fields True Belief was now having won for it the battle which at home it hadlost; and by a strange irony the man most responsible for that turn in its fortunes was he who, once its rising hope, had been so uncompromisingly cast forth for a too-relative adherence to revealed Truth.
One day word was brought to Mr. Trimblerigg that certain elders of True Belief had been of a mind to search the Scriptures concerning him: and the word had come, not inappositely—though open to different shades of interpretation: ‘Cast thy bread upon the waters, and after many days it shall return to thee.’ And it was reported that the said elders had been impressed and had made a note of it.
Mr. Trimblerigg was pleased by the news, for it meant that a door still stood open; and though he had no intention of passing through it again, he liked it to be open. For he was now busy opening a door to them; and theirs being open in return, they might eventually pass through it to him. The idea of relegating the mission field definitely to True Belief under an agreed coalition of the Churches began to attract him, for it was becoming clear to him that among the mentally deficient True Belief was the quickest and most effective way to conversion, if only it could be made non-sectarian—a means rather than an end. He saw, with speculative instinct that looked like faith, how a place might be found for all on a plan of his own making. Thus the great fusion of the Free Churches toward which he was working came a step nearer to practical politics.
His work being the organization of missions, it was often his duty to entertain missionaries. And as the best time of all, for establishing confidential relations, was to meet them in friendly intimacy immediately upon their arrival, it was beginning to be his practice to invite as guest to hishouse any prominent missionary who had come home on leave. Thus in the course of a few years the very cream of the Free Evangelical mission world, and a few others from connections that were friendly, passed through his hands.
It was from one of these latter that Mr. Trimblerigg received news of the swift civilization that was taking place in parts scarcely heard of as yet, owing to the beneficent efforts of certain missionary centres not only to sow the seed of the faith but to develop the wealth and resources of the fields in which they laboured. This particular missioner was an optimist about his own districts. ‘In fifty years’ time,’ he said, ‘it will be for its size, the richest country outside Europe and the States.’ And as its size was nearly half that of France such a forecast suggested big possibilities.
He went on to tell with what prudent and fatherly care those in control of the missions had headed off the rapacious traders and concession hunters, who follow in the missionary’s track, by obtaining from the native chiefs exclusive rights strategically based upon the routes of trade, such for instance as the building of landing-stages at the junction of rivers, and the setting up of white settlements on the high table-lands of the interior.
As a consequence the economic future of the country was controlled, not indeed by the missionary society itself, but by a humane-minded organization of business interests working with and through it. And under this happy co-operation the Native Industries Company in the Ray River territory to the north of Puto-Congo (not then the familiar name it has become since) had opened up commercial relations at the cost of only a few score thousand pounds,which in the near future might be worth millions. They were already paying an interest on shares which compared favourably with larger ventures of longer date; and as the total number of shares was comparatively small, they offered to early investors a great future.
And so Mr. Trimblerigg, who had a taste for speculative transfer, sold out and reinvested a few hundred pounds in Native Industries Limited; and receiving his dividends thereafter on the scale promised, thought very little further about it, except as something sound which carried with it the larger hope of value that might increase.
The sense in which he thought very little about it, was as to the actual source of its profits—oil, rubber, copra, or ivory—the methods of its working, and the men who worked it, or what it really did for the native beyond making him more accessible to the influence of missions and of trade. As to that last, a very slight preliminary inquiry had satisfied him that it was so; and there he left it. It never occurred to Mr. Trimblerigg, who was eloquently opposed to corporal punishment in his own country for crimes of violence and such like, to inquire whether corporal punishment played any part in making his dividends from Native Industries Limited nearer ten than five per cent per annum. And why indeed should it occur to him? The shareholder system, on which modern trade is run, does not prompt such mental occurrence; and where so many millions are satisfied that their responsibilities end in the acceptance of the reports of their directors, can any particular blame attach to one, however eminent in the organization of the mission field, if he also was satisfied, and become in consequence forgetful?
Mr. Trimblerigg had then—as always—a perfectly clearconscience. He was very busy, he was doing good work; his doctrine of relative truth was giving theology a more modern and a much more sensible mind about all the things it could not really prove but loved to fight about; the coalition of the Free Churches was advancing under his manipulation by leaps and bounds; behind that loomed Disestablishment. Given a greater corporate union of Nonconformity, the argument for it would be irresistible; and when it came he would be the up-to-date Luther before whose assault that final stronghold of religious privilege toppled to ruin. For Mr. Trimblerigg had been busy not only in the organization of missions but upon the political side also; and would no doubt by this time have gone into Parliament had not somebody already been there before him who was doing what he would have done in exactly the same way—with the same brilliance, the same elasticity, the same eloquence, the same hand-to-mouth conviction, and the same enthusiastic and catchword-loving following. Parliament did not need two wizards to cast upon it the same spell. That was the reason why Mr. Trimblerigg kept his wizardry for the Churches.
And so, through strenuous years Mr. Trimblerigg laboured to make Free Evangelicalism greater, and more powerful, and more feared than it had ever yet been; and before he had touched middle age he began to be spoken of as candidate for the high office of President at the Annual Conference—a post for which previously no head without grey hair on it had ever qualified.
It only wanted some great cause, some big agitation led by himself, to carry him through and make him, before he reached the age of forty, the most prominent figure in the Nonconformist world. And then, while he was looking forit, came, just in the nick of time, the story, the horrible story of the Puto-Congo atrocities.
He was no missionary and no trader, but a mere outsider who brought it to Europe; and when, for reasons, Government threw a belittling doubt upon it, questioning the motives and veracity of its reporter, then Mr. Trimblerigg saw his chance, and blew a blast to the Free Evangelical mission world. He took up the cause, made it his own, and gave it all the publicity it required.