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This book brings together essays from scholars working on the first century
of French print culture, with a particular focus on the networks formed by ‘Le Bel Épy qui foisonne’
authors, editors, translators and printers in the earliest years of print technology.
Collection and Translation
Catherine Emerson (ed.) • Collection

The volume is structured around the themes of collection and translation.
The first part of the book examines the gathering of sources, the creation of in French Print Networks,
anthologies and collections and the efforts of collectors to create a legacy.
The second part deals with translation and the ways in which editors present 1476–1576
a text to a new audience, either in a different language, as part of a different
culture or through images that translate the text visually. Together, the essays
raise important questions about early modern French culture, revealing how
texts are the products both of the networks that create them and of those that
distribute, read and interpret them after publication.
Catherine Emerson (ed.)
‘Le Bel Épy qui foisonne’

and Translation in French Print Networks, 1476–1576
Catherine Emerson worked at the University of Hull and Trinity College

Dublin before becoming a lecturer in French at the National University of
Ireland, Galway. Her research focuses on the literature of the fifteenth-century
Burgundian court and its transmission in the era of print. She is interested in
the literature and culture of multilingual societies and has also published on
Belgian cultural identities.
16
MEDIEVAL AND
ISBN 978-1-78707-773-7 EARLY MODERN
Peter Lang
FRENCH STUDIES
www.peterlang.com
This book brings together essays from scholars working on the first century
of French print culture, with a particular focus on the networks formed by ‘Le Bel Épy qui foisonne’
authors, editors, translators and printers in the earliest years of print technology.
Collection and Translation
Catherine Emerson (ed.) • Collection

The volume is structured around the themes of collection and translation.
The first part of the book examines the gathering of sources, the creation of in French Print Networks,
anthologies and collections and the efforts of collectors to create a legacy.
The second part deals with translation and the ways in which editors present 1476–1576
a text to a new audience, either in a different language, as part of a different
culture or through images that translate the text visually. Together, the essays
raise important questions about early modern French culture, revealing how
texts are the products both of the networks that create them and of those that
distribute, read and interpret them after publication.

and Translation in French Print Networks, 1476–1576
Catherine Emerson worked at the University of Hull and Trinity College

Dublin before becoming a lecturer in French at the National University of
Ireland, Galway. Her research focuses on the literature of the fifteenth-century
Burgundian court and its transmission in the era of print. She is interested in
the literature and culture of multilingual societies and has also published on
Belgian cultural identities.
16
MEDIEVAL AND
EARLY MODERN
Peter Lang
FRENCH STUDIES
www.peterlang.com
Medieval and Early Modern French Studies
Series Editor
Noël Pe acoc k
Volume 16
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien
Collection and Translation in
French Print Networks, 1476–1576
PETER LANG
Oxford • Bern • Berlin • Bruxelles • New York • Wien
Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche National-
bibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at
http://dnb.d-nb.de.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.
Cover design by Peter Lang Ltd.
issn 1661-8653
isbn 978-1-78707-773-7 (print) • isbn 978-1-78707-774-4 (ePDF)
isbn 978-1-78707-775-1 (ePub) • isbn 978-1-78707-776-8 (mobi)
© Peter Lang AG 2019
Published by Peter Lang Ltd, International Academic Publishers,

52 St Giles, Oxford, OX1 3LU, United Kingdom
oxford@peterlang.com, www.peterlang.com
Catherine Emerson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editor of this Work.
All rights reserved.

All parts of this publication are protected by copyright.
Any utilisation outside the strict limits of the copyright law, without
the permission of the publisher, is forbidden and liable to prosecution.
This applies in particular to reproductions, translations, microfilming,
and storage and processing in electronic retrieval systems.
This publication has been peer reviewed.
Printed in Germany
Contents
Catherine Emerson
Introduction1
Part I Collection 7
Pollie Bromilow
1 Printing the Ties that Bind: Pierre de Changy’s
Translation of the De institutione feminæ Christianæ
by Juan Luis Vives 9
Nina Mueggler
2 Configurer des réseaux par le recueil: le cas du Parnasse des
Poëtes Françoys modernes de Corrozet (1571) 31
Catherine Emerson
3 Nicole Gilles and Literate Society 53
Part iI Translation 71
Antonella Amatuzzi
La Merveilleuse et joyeuse vie de Esope de Glaude Luython:
4
un fablier bilingue pour l’enseignement du français au
Pays Bas 73
vi
Louis-Gabriel Bonicoli
5 Connecting Texts via their Illustration in Parisian Early
Printed Books 93
Oury Goldman
6 Un lieu de savoir sur le monde: la boutique de l’imprimeur-
libraire Michel de Vascosan dans le Paris de la Renaissance 113
Index137
Catherine Emerson
Introduction
The chapters in this volume deal with the first century of printing in France
and the networks that were formed during this period that enabled books
to be published. These chapters have been divided into the broad categories
of collection and translation and, on the face of it, these two categories
would appear to address the question of the origins of texts and of their
afterlife. Collection refers to the act of gathering together different elements,
of anthologizing, synthesizing, gathering sources to make something that
is greater than its constituent parts. Translation, on the other hand, seems
to provide an answer to the question of what happens to a text after it
first appears: how is it reinscribed and repackaged for new readers, either
through linguistic transposition or physical presentation in a new setting.
Subtending both concepts is the idea of growth, of development, which
is also apparent in the quotation which gives this collection its title. The
‘bel épy qui foisonne’ could be a metaphor for the print trade itself, which
rapidly grew into a powerful and wide-reaching industry during its first
century in France. The image chimes with the horticultural metaphors used
by Joachim Du Bellay to refer to the cultivation of French language and
literature.1 It seems fitting that Du Bellay’s metaphor should be extended
to printing, which after all is the vehicle of transmission for that language
and literature. However, an examination of the quotation in its context
shows that its author, Pierre Tamisier, is using the image of the ear of corn
to describe the fecundity of the artist’s source material rather than the
1 Joachim Du Bellay, La Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française, ed. Léon Séché

(Paris: Sansot, 1905), pp. 63–7, Chapter 3, ‘Pourquoi la langue françoise n’est si riche
que la greque et latine’.
2 Catherine Emerson
spread of the poet’s influence.2 The ear of corn that appears to be such a
fitting image for the spread of the printed word is in fact used by Tamisier
to illustrate the potential of what came before, the largely manuscript
transmission that preceded print.
The potential multivalence of the image of the ear of corn points to
the fact that the categories in this volume are not necessarily impermeable.
Pollie Bromilow’s examination of Pierre de Changy’s translation of Juan
Luis Vives’s De institutione feminæ Christianæ is an examination of how
different sources were gathered together to create a family book, and the
chapter opens the section dealing with collection, but it is also a study of
how Vives’s text reached a different audience through translation into the
vernacular. Similarly, Oury Goldman’s chapter, which closes the section
on translation, describes how the translation of vernacular texts containing
information about remote lands contributed to a project that collected texts
and scholars in the workshop of Michel de Vascosan. These two contribu-
tions, which open and close the volume, are not polar opposites, but share
many common concerns. Collection and translation are not such separate
categories as the parts of this book might imply.
This is in itself a testimony to the expanding and changing world of
French print networks in the first century of print. Social realities were
changing as the print world developed, and the world of print responded
to these changes. Each act of translation was also a new act of collection,
a transformation of the text, certainly, but also a reappraisal of its sources.
Goldman’s chapter describes one factor influencing social change as he shows
some of the turmoil accompanying the religious reform movements of the
sixteenth century and the networks that were created between men who
shared an ideology. At the same time, Nina Mueggler describes the creation
of a virtual sociability which brings together people from different ideo
logical positions in the pages of an anthology to try to portray an image of a
France that goes beyond social divisions. Social change produces a range of
responses in the world of print. So too does technological change. A number
2 Le Parnasse des Poëtes Françoys modernes: Contenant leurs plus riches et graves sentences,
discours, descriptions et doctes enseignemens (Paris: Galiot Corrozet, 1571), fol. A iiii
recto– B i recto. See Nina Mueggler’s chapter, p. 46.
Introduction 3
of chapters in this volume deal with the way that printed texts adopt the
conventions of manuscript texts particularly in terms of layout on the page,
but, as Catherine Emerson’s contribution suggests, manuscripts continued
to be produced and they were also influenced by the layout of printed texts.
Indeed, as Emerson reminds us, and as Bromilow also mentions, printed
books and high-status manuscripts fulfilled similar social roles in the early
years of print and so it is not surprising that we see physical characteristics of
one being borrowed in the other. This is only one of the ways in which the
chapters of this volume address the relationship between the physical mise
en page of the book and the text. Antonella Amatuzzi draws our attention
to the lexical choices suggested by the decision to present a translation in a
facing-page text edition. The juxtaposition of French and Dutch favours the
use of lexical forms that resemble each other as the bilingual text is intended
to serve as a work of instruction for language learners. A number of contri-
butions in this volume examine the ways in which texts are produced with
educational goals in mind, whether this be the domestic and moral instruc-
tion of family members described in Pollie Bromilow’s account of Pierre de
Changy’s translations, or the world of the Antwerp schools described by
Amatuzzi, where the French language was the key to social advancement,
or Michel de Vascosan’s specialist printing for the University of Paris, men-
tioned briefly by Oury Goldman. The examples in this volume remind us
that education is not a single thing and that there are different educational
uses of texts. It should also be remarked that, even once texts are translated
for educational purposes, this translation does not define the way in which
the texts are used by future readers. Amatuzzi provides details of a number
of monolingual Dutch editions of Glaude Luython’s translations of Æsop,
which presumably had different goals and different readers from the facing-
page translations that had made up Luython’s original edition.
In this context, Louis-Gabriel Bonicoli’s discussion of meaningful
reuse of images is relevant, in that it reminds us that reuse of an image can
imply its reinterpretation or indeed can introduce a whole set of new asso-
ciations simply by virtue of the fact that an image is being reused. Pollie
Bromilow, Nina Mueggler and Catherine Emerson all discuss works that
were published posthumously and discuss ways in which the text can escape
the author’s original intention and have a new life after the author’s death.
4 Catherine Emerson
Bonicoli shows that this is true too of the more material elements of the
text and that reuse of illustrations was not simply a matter of decorative
expediency. Taken together, the contributions to this volume paint a pic-
ture of print networks that were diverse, dynamic and international. Many
of the contributions talk about personal relationships between printers in
different countries which facilitated the movement and translation of texts
for the francophone market. Individually, each chapter gives us an insight
into a particular feature of this world but together they demonstrate the
vitality of the world itself.
Pollie Bromilow describes the collection of translations presented by
Pierre de Changy to his children. The survival – and indeed the expansion –
of this volume after Changy’s death is testimony not only to the dedication
of Changy’s son Blaise and his recognition of his father’s contribution to
the family, but also to the popularity of such anthologies amongst the
reading public.
Nina Mueggler also writes about an anthology published by a son
after the death of his father. In this case, Galiot Corrozet’s publication of
Gilles Corrozet’s collection completed the work of the father whose aim
had always been a print circulation. Mueggler examines the way in which
the elder Corrozet selects the poets that he is going to publish, how he
orders them in the list of contents and what details he omits – notably
all mention of Lyon – in order to portray a particular sort of French liter-
ary society. Mueggler argues persuasively that Corrozet’s choices are not
accidental but are part of a conscious effort to shape the definition of ‘les
Modernes’ in terms of poetry.
Emerson looks at the multiple ways in which Nicole Gilles interacted
with the print society of his time. Certainly the investor in a printing part-
nership and the author of a posthumous history, the purchaser, reader and
anthologizer of books in his history, Gilles may also have been the adaptor
of fictional texts for the Parisian market. Emerson examines the ways in
which Gilles interacted with the literate world – which she points out is
not simply the world of print – in ways that favoured the transmission of
his text after his death.
Amatuzzi examines the translation of Æsop’s fables from Latin into
French and then from French into Dutch for the Antwerp French-language
Introduction 5
schools. She reveals that the strategies for translating Latin, which would
not appear on the page of the final edition, are very different from those
used to translate French into Dutch, where both languages would be vis-
ible. Whereas Latin is glossed, amplified and abridged to produce a text
which is less foreign to contemporary readers, Luython makes efforts to
create close textual and linguistic parallels between the Dutch and French
texts which will appear side by side.
Louis-Gabriel Bonicoli looks at the reuse of images (woodcuts and
metalcuts) in printed editions. Most of his corpus is taken from the output
of Antoine Vérard, whose fine editions have been very comprehensively
studied, though Bonicoli reminds us that similar reuse can be identified
in the editions of many of the printers of the period. Reuse was not a
new feature of the print age but was part of medieval praxis, and Bonicoli
argues that readers were used to making the meaningful connections that
reuse implies.
The volume closes with an examination by Oury Goldman of the
translations of travel literature published by Michel de Vascosan in 1553–5.
Goldman reminds us that these texts form only a small part of Vascosan’s
output in those years, but are a significant part of his publication of new
texts. He demonstrates that they are the result of links between Vascosan
and a network of authors, editors and translators, with shared ideological
positions. He examines the extent to which these networks and the edi-
tions that resulted from them may have been promoted in the service of
royal colonial ambitions in what is now Brazil. Such connections remind
us that the decision to publish may be informed by considerations other
than the publisher’s personal interest in a subject. This conclusion should
not come as a surprise to anyone who has read the contributions in this
volume. Again and again the chapters show that there are many factors
determining what gets published, and why. Personal connections, financial
considerations and ideology all have their role to play and the chapters of
this book illustrate how this led to the flourishing of the world of French
print by the end of the fifteenth century.
Part I
Collection
Pollie Bromilow
1 Printing the Ties that Bind: Pierre de Changy’s

Translation of the De institutione feminæ
Christianæ by Juan Luis Vives
Abstract
The 1543 edition which included Pierre de Changy’s translation Institution de la femme
chrestienne offers us a new window onto the ways in which conduct books and texts on
household governance were written and circulated in households in the sixteenth century.
The edition creates a sense of unity, through references to the Changy family and to male
and female domestic roles. Thematic and pedagogical similarities between this collection
and fifteenth-century manuscript miscellanies suggest the potential continuity of read-
ing practices within the household even in the middle decades of the sixteenth century.
Through print, family documents were commodified and transformed into a widely dis-
seminated handbook on family morality.
The sixteenth century witnessed the flourishing in print of books that

described, theorized, and gave guidance on life within the household. Some
books were concerned with the practical aspects of household management,
which were defined by such activities as cookery, wine or agriculture.1 Other
works were conduct manuals, concerned primarily with the behaviour of
household members, especially women and children. For these works the
household was a moral entity as much as it was a physical place. The 1543
1 An example of the popularity of the genre of household management in sixteenth-

century France is seen in the many editions of the Agriculture et maison rustique by
Charles Estienne and Jean Liébault, a French translation of the Prædium rusticum
by the same authors. It includes three chapters on the moral characteristics and
obligations of farm managers: ‘L’Office du pere de famille’ (fol. 8 recto), ‘L’Office
du fermier’ (fol. 8 verso), and ‘L’Estat de la fermiere’ (fol. 8 verso). Charles Estienne
and Jean Liébault, Agriculture et maison rustique (Paris: Jacques du Puys, 1564;
USTC 30233).
10 Pollie Bromilow
Jacques Kerver edition of the Institution de la femme chrestienne, a French

translation by Pierre de Changy of the De institutione feminæ Christianæ by
Juan Luis Vives, offers us a new window onto the ways in which conduct
books and texts on household governance were written and circulated
in households in the sixteenth century.2 It sought not only to reproduce
in print familial relationships, but actively strove to shape the reading
practices of households across extended social networks, which, through
the circulation of the work in print, would come to encompass the book-
reading public in Paris.
The volume attracts our attention nowadays because of the transla-
tion of the first, longest and most famous text in the collection, the De
institutione feminæ Christianæ. However, it also contained translations
from Latin by Pierre de Changy of the De officio mariti by Vives, an unat-
tributed French translation of the Pseudo-Bernhardine Epistola de cura
rei familiaris, together with a treatise on humility composed by Changy
himself in the vernacular. The book as a whole is an instance of the very
widespread sixteenth-century practice of printing several texts together
in a single volume. This resulted in textual groupings marketed primarily
under the heading of a single text. Although not self-proclaimed antholo-
gies, these books nevertheless display what we might understand to be
‘anthologising tendencies’.3 They were collections of texts compiled on a
common theme, linked to certain historical events or united by a common
author. They could have been gathered together because of a – sometimes
scarcely perceptible – multi-agency pseudo-editorial imperative whereby
texts were selected according to personal literary or cultural tastes.
2 Juan Luis Vives, Livre tres bon plaisant et salutaire de l’institution de la femme chres-
tienne, tant en son enfance, que mariage et viduite (Paris: Jacques Fezandat for Jacques
Kerver, 1543; USTC 27254). All references are to this edition unless otherwise stated.
3 Writing on Changy’s methodology more generally, Jean Vignes has commented:
‘en l’absence d’une poétique cohérente en matière de traduction, on doit toute-
fois s’interroger sur la démarche anthologique de Changy et sur l’interprétation à
donner à certaines modifications infligées au texte’. ‘En attendant du Pinet: Pierre de
Changy et son Sommaire des singularitez de Pline’, in Esculape et Dionysos: Mélanges
en l’honneur de Jean Céard, ed. Jean Dupèbe and others (Geneva: Droz, 2008),
pp. 459–70’, p. 466.
Printing the Ties that Bind 11
This essay explores the links between the different texts in the 1543
Kerver edition of the Institution de la femme chrestienne. It analyses the ways
in which references to the Changy family and the notion of the household
as a site of moral development create a sense of unity in the volume where
the individual texts and the reading guidance given by the prefaces may
otherwise appear to be only superficially linked. The volume as a whole
includes texts which explore both female and male roles within the domes-
tic realm, translations and original works, dedicatory epistles addressed to
both male and female recipients, texts by living authors as well as medieval
works, short as well as long texts. In studying the ways in which the volume
was brought together, this essay will also trace the movements of texts as
they cross the borders that separate Latin from the vernacular languages,
manuscript transmission from print circulation and private family reading
from more widespread dissemination amongst a general reading public.
Educating the Family in the Institution de la

femme chrestienne
The primary reason for the publication of the first edition of the Institution
de la femme chrestienne in 1542 was to make French translations of the De
institutione feminæ Christianæ and the De officio mariti available for the
first time.4 This new accessibility to the reading public literate either solely
or more fluently in the vernacular was an important milestone in the dis-
semination of the texts because, unusually for works composed by such a
prominent humanist educator, they both circulated more widely in trans-
lation than in the original Latin.5 The De institutione feminæ Christianæ
4 Juan Luis Vives, Livre de l’institution de la femme chrestienne (Paris: Jacques Kerver,
1542; USTC 40209). See the publication history of the Institution de la femme
chrestienne presented by Vignes, ‘En Attendant du Pinet’, p. 462.
5 Enrique González González, ‘Fame and Oblivion’, trans. Charles Fantazzi in Brill’s
Companions to the Christian Tradition: A Companion to Juan Luis Vives, ed. Charles
Fantazzi (Leiden: Brill, 2008), pp. 359–413, pp. 365–6.
12 Pollie Bromilow
was translated into no fewer than eight vernacular languages in total and
travelled as far as New Mexico.6 This widespread dissemination of the work
is a reflection of the level of innovation the work offered to the reader in
proposing in print a comprehensive guide to moral living for women from
the earliest days of girlhood to widowhood and old age. Furthermore, Vives’s
own erudition must have contributed to the intellectual and moral interest
of the text on a subject which so few authors had treated at such length
and in such detail.7 The fact that the De institutione feminæ Christianæ
and the De officio mariti had been available in translation in English and
Castilian for over a decade suggests that the print publication of Changy’s
translations would have met with an air of expectation from the French-
language readership.
The printing of a second edition of the Institution de la femme
chrestienne in 1543 by Michel Fezandat for Jacques Kerver included not
just this text and a translation of the De officio mariti, but also two other
texts that had a significance within the Changy family. This 1543 edition
and three subsequent impressions where these texts are also included on
the title page stand out because they deepen our understanding of the types
of vernacular texts that were composed, circulated and read in the early
modern household.8 Other sixteenth-century editions of the Institution de
la femme chrestienne have the clear rationale of presenting the Vives works
6 The De institutione feminæ Christianæ was translated into Castilian (1528), English
(1528), French (1542), German (1544), Italian (1546), Dutch (1554). For full details
of these works and an account of the wider influence of the work see Juan Luis Vives,
The Education of a Christian Woman, ed. and trans. Charles Fantazzi (Chicago and
London: Chicago University Press, 2000), pp. 30–5. The De institutione feminæ
Christianæ was especially influential in the work of the seventeenth-century Mexican
nun Sor Juana de la Cruz. See, for example, Elizabeth Teresa Howe, ‘Sor Juana Ines
de la Cruz and Juan Luis Vives’, Discurso, 11 (1993), 63–72.
7 As Charles Fantazzi has noted: ‘Vives compiled the most systematic treatise on the
education of women of all the various essays on the status of women in the Renaissance.
His influence on this subject, both in England and Europe, was incalculable’. Juan
Luis Vives, De institutione feminæ Christianæ: liber primus, ed. Charles Fantazzi and
Constantinus Matheeussen; trans. C. Fantazzi (Leiden: Brill, 1996), xxvi.
8 These are USTC 40487, USTC 63558 and USTC 14864.
to a vernacular reading public.9 Whilst they also include liminary poetry

in Latin and French by Blaise de Changy and his friends and epistles from
Pierre de Changy and his son Jacques to Pierre’s daughters Marguerite
and Madamoyselle de Villesablon, these books relied for their success on
the renown of the humanist scholar who had composed the two principal
texts in Latin. However, the 1543 Kerver edition presents a broader range
of educational and household texts. As well as specifying the coverage of
the Institution de la femme chrestienne (‘tant en son enfance, que mariage
et viduite’ [in her childhood, marriage and widowhood]), all three of the
other works in the volume are inventorized on the title page and the idea of
‘nouveauté’ plays a prominent role. The Office du mary is said to have been
‘nouvellement traduictz en langue francoyse par Pierre de Changy escuyer’
[newly translated into French by Pierre de Changy, Equery]. A treatise on
humility, an original work by Changy himself, has been ‘adjoustee de nou-
veau’ [newly added] together with an unattributed French translation of
the Pseudo-Bernhardine Epistola de cura rei familiaris.10 This is the innova-
tion relative to the 1542 edition of the Institution de la femme chrestienne.
Finally, the works are described as ‘reveu et corrige oultre les precedentes
impressions’ [revised and corrected since previous printings].
In positioning itself as a book which sought to fulfil the educational
needs of the family as a whole, the Institution de la femme chrestienne may
have adopted a formula that had already been developed in relation to the
original Latin works written by Vives. As González González has asserted:
9 These are: USTC 40489, USTC 49488, USTC 76649, USTC 9767, USTC 41282,
USTC 40600, USTC 62158 and USTC 993. There are also four impressions listed in
the USTC which have no surviving copies. These are USTC 40657, USTC 40488,
USTC 40730 and USTC 62179.
10 The translation of the Epistola de cura rei familiaris is attributed to Bernard de
Clairvaux, although this attribution is now widely regarded as insecure. As Mark
Kauntze has explained: ‘the problem is that Bernard’s name came to carry a certain
authority among later generations, and all the other treatises ascribed to him in
manuscripts [except the Cosmographia] are to varying degrees dubious’. Authority
and Imitation: A Study of the ‘Cosmographia’ of Bernard Silvestris (Leiden: Brill,
2014), p. 26.
14 Pollie Bromilow
In 1538, from Basel Thomas Winter disseminated the Latin text of both treatises [the
De institutione feminæ Christianæ and the De officio mariti], revised by the author,
throughout Europe, at first each separately, but already in 1540 and again around 1541
both treatises in a single volume, with the addition of two letters for the instruction
of young boys and girls, which gave the ensemble the tone of a handbook for the
education of the whole family.11
Although no direct link can be proven between the Winter editions and
the compilation of the Institution de la femme chrestienne, a number of
similarities can be observed between the two works. This is most obviously
true in the selection of the De institutione feminæ Christianæ and the De
officio mariti as texts that accompany each other, a choice made by Blaise
de Changy, Pierre’s son. It would seem an obvious but worthwhile point
to make that this mirrors the state of matrimonial harmony promoted by
the texts themselves. In the volume they are companion texts as husband
and wife are throughout life. The Changy volume shares with the Winter
editions the inclusion of epistles and dedications which seek to further the
book’s educational aims. Above all, the Institution de la femme chrestienne
has in common with the Winter editions the suitability of its constituent
elements for the whole family. Changy’s evaluation of the De institutione
feminæ Christianæ as ‘bon et utile pour livre domestique’ can equally be
applied to the other parts of the volume.12
The prefaces to the translations of the De institutione feminæ Christianæ
and the De officio mariti further emphasize the links between the different
members of the Changy family. They are dedicated by Pierre to his chil-
dren Marguerite and Blaise. These dedications by Pierre to his children
are a distinctive and unifying aspect of the volume. So often in sixteenth-
century print culture the dedicatee of a book was a potential patron or
prestigious ‘ideal reader’ whose virtues were said to be reflected in the work
at hand. This had been the case with the original Latin edition of the De
11 González González, ‘Fame and Oblivion’, p. 365.

12 Institution de la femme chrestienne, A5 verso. On this point see Pollie Bromilow,
‘An Emerging Female Readership of Print in Sixteenth-Century France? Pierre de
Changy’s Translation of the De institutione feminæ Christianæ by Juan Luis Vives’,
French Studies 67 (2013), 155–70, p. 163.
institutione feminæ Christianæ, which was printed in Antwerp in 1524. It

was dedicated to Catherine of Aragon and the dedication to her was trans-
lated by Changy and included in the Institution de la femme chrestienne
and preceded the epistle he had written to his daughter, who is referred to
simply as ‘Marguerite’. The fact of a father from outside the court or nobil-
ity dedicating the text to his daughter can be considered exceptional in the
1540s. It can be contextualized by Jessica Murphy’s remark on women’s
conduct manuals in the English language that they ‘are often dedicated
either to the young women whom they will benefit or to patronesses who
stand as great examples of behaviour’.13 The title of the epistle ‘A Marguerite
ma fille’ [To Marguerite my daughter] emphasizes the importance of the
father-daughter relationship over any markers of social standing. This
dedication to a family member is different even from Pierre de Changy’s
other translation which was also published posthumously and dedicated
by his son Blaise to the Bishop of Orléans.14
In the dedication, Changy alludes to women’s lack of knowledge of the
Latin language as one of his primary motivations for translating the work:
Car je trouvoys indecent telz et si bons enseignemens pour Filles, Femmes et Vesves y
contenus leur estre occultes et mussez par tel et si hault latin a elles non entendibles.
[Because I found it inconvenient that such and so good teachings for girls, wives
and widows found within were obscured and muted by such and so high Latin not
understandable to them.]15
Although the circumstances of composition of texts were commonly

included in prefaces in the sixteenth century, this revelation by Pierre de
Changy is a key way in which he performs his paternal role in print. The
13 Jessica C. Murphy, Virtuous Necessity: Conduct Literature and the Making of the
Virtuous Woman in Early Modern England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan
Press, 2015), p. 3.
14 Sommaire des Singularitez de Pline, extraict des seize premiers livres de sa naturelle
histoire, et mis en vulgaire Francoys par Pierre de Changy, escuyer (Paris: Arnoul and
Charles Angelier, 1542; USTC 88999 and 40305). For a study of this text see Vignes,
‘En attendant du Pinet’.
15 Institution de la femme chrestienne, A5 verso. All translations are my own.
16 Pollie Bromilow
primary emotion expressed in the dedication is one of care: care for his
daughter and care for women readers more generally. As such, Changy’s
volume comes to represent qualities of fatherhood which combined affec-
tion and authority that Philip Grace has explained thus:
It is not that fathers were either figures of vertical, hierarchical authority or horizontal
bonds of affection: it was that they exemplified diagonal bonds; they combined the
power to enforce order with tenderness toward their charges. The richness of the
connection between different roles gave fatherhood its significance both in everyday
experience and as a metaphor used in a variety of contexts.16
The fact of undertaking the translation is an example of vertical authority

in action. Pierre de Changy uses his linguistic knowledge to provide a text
infused with his fatherly ability to guide and advise. Yet, his anticipation of
high levels of reader engagement suggests that this text will be one which
supports the reader’s own learning as well as imposing behavioural models
from above. As such it demonstrates the diagonal dynamic which Grace
contends was so strongly associated with models of fatherhood.
This diagonal role of the father as mixing hierarchical power and
horizontal care is also demonstrated when Pierre recounts how both of
the original Latin texts have been passed to him by his sons, Blaise and
Jacques. In the preface to the Institution de la femme chrestienne, Pierre tells
his daughter Marguerite that the text came to be in his possession ‘de la
librairie du seigneur sainct Anthot conseiller en nostre souveraine court à
Digeon ton frere maistre Jacques docteur es droictz ma apporte à Changy
ung livre en latin’ [from the library of Lord Sainct Anthot councillor in
our sovereign court in Dijon your brother Master Jacques Doctor in Law
brought to me in Changy a Latin book]. By detailing the journey of the
volume from the library of a legal officeholder in the Court in Dijon to
the village in Changy, Pierre is inscribing the translation in the literary and
social networks of the Changy family. He is also presenting the book not
only as the product of his own concern for his children, but as the result
of the care and affection that his offspring show each other.
16 Philip Grace, Affectionate Authorities: Fathers and Fatherly Roles in Late Medieval
Basel (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), p. 9.
The epistle prefacing the Office du mary also explains the physical
journey taken by the book. The letter starts with the address ‘A Blaise de
Changy mon filz, estudiant a Paris’ [To Blaise de Changy my son, student
in Paris].17 It is interesting to note the ways in which Changy addresses his
daughter Marguerite and his son Blaise differently. We are told that Blaise
is a student in Paris and he is also referred to by his family name as well as
his first name. Marguerite, on the other hand, is referred to as Changy’s
daughter. She is given no geographical location and only her first name is
given. Marguerite is also addressed in the ‘tu’ form, whereas Blaise is consist-
ently addressed using ‘vous’. These differences might reflect a difference in
forms of address for family members residing in or outside the household.
In the letter, Pierre de Changy describes the way in which Blaise sent him
the original Latin text to translate from Paris:
Monsieur le cure d’Espoisses, apres avoir traduict en langue maternelle le livre dessus
escript, de l’institution de la femme chrestienne, vous m’avez envoye de Paris, le livre
de l’office du mary, compose par le mesme aucteur en plus parfonde matiere, pour le
joindre avec le precedent: mais icelluy avez requis estre mis en Francois.
[The curate of Espoisses, having translated into the mother tongue the book written
above on the Institution de la femme chrestienne, you sent to me from Paris the book
of the Office du mary written by the same author in greater depth to add it to the
preceding text: but this one you requested be rendered into French.]18
Again, Blaise is given an occupation, this time as a priest rather than a

student. Both descriptions give him authority as a compiler of educational
texts. Here we learn that the translation of the De officio mariti was a com-
mission from Blaise which he intended to put together with the Institution
de la femme chrestienne. This dedication reveals the role Blaise played in
shaping the contents of the volume as well as in preparing it for publication.
A further comment by Changy seems to suggest that the translation of the
De officio mariti was not a task that he felt the same depth of motivation
for as his rendering of the De institutione feminæ Christianæ: ‘Jay pris le plus
17 Institution de la femme chrestienne, P1 recto.

18 Pollie Bromilow
commun, empesche de viellesse, et maladie selon mon petit entendement’

[I took the most simple [points] prevented by old age and illness according
to my little understanding].19
The fourth text in the volume is also dedicated to a member of the
Changy family. The Briefve instruction is the only original piece described
on the title page to be included in the volume. In the 1543 Jacques Kerver
edition, this treatise has two recipients. It is prefaced by an epistle from
Jacques de Changy to his sister, Madamoyselle de Villesablon and later
presented more simply by Pierre de Changy to his daughter Francoyse
who was a nun in the convent of St Claire at Bourges.20 Whereas previous
prefaces have revealed the dynamics apparent in the relationships between
Pierre de Changy and his daughters, this preface by Jacques, his only writ-
ten contribution to the volume, demonstrates that moral and educational
aspirations were intra-generational. There are few traces of Madamoyselle
de Villesablon’s life in this prayer, which is several pages long and con-
cludes, as does the instruction it prefaces, with the word ‘amen’. From
the recipient’s unmarried status and the wide variety of virtues and vices
evoked by the prayer, we can assume that the epistle addresses the perceived
devotional needs of a young woman as she journeys through life. As well
as virtues commonly praised in women in the practice of their everyday
lives such as chastity, the epistle focuses on the woman’s interior life and
her relationship to God:
Soyez poure en esperit, simple et debonnaire, ayez desir de justice, plorez tous pechez,
soyez misericordieuse, et nourrissez paix, souffrez persecution justement, esjouyssez
vous si l’on vous blasme, gardez vous d’ingratitude, recongnoissez les benefices de
Dieu, fuyez parolles oyseuses et noyseuses, n’escoutez point flateurs …
[Be poor in spirit, simple and mild, desire justice, lament all sins, be merciful and
nourish peace, accept persecution justly, rejoice if you are reproached, keep yourself
from ingratitude, recognise God’s favours, flee idle and damaging words and don’t
listen to flattery …]21

20 Institution de la femme chrestienne, S5 verso.
21 Institution de la femme chrestienne, S6 recto.
What this preface shows us is that Jacques saw himself as Madamoyselle de

Villesablon’s educator and instructor, a position legitimized in the text by
the emphasis on the offices he held in the epistle’s title: ‘Escuyer, Docteur
es droictz, Advocat a Dijon’.22 We can read this epistle as a textual echo of
the instruction penned by Pierre and in that sense it fulfils some of the
conventional expectations of the preface, such as training the reader on
how to read the text, although this guidance for the reader is not made
explicit. Even the description of Jacques as an ‘escuyer’ repeats the descrip-
tion on the title page of the volume of the translator as ‘Pierre de Changy,
escuyer’. The inclusion of the epistle by Jacques reveals that the book was
likely put together by the Changy family over a period of time. It may
have been commissioned precisely because the Briefve instruction did not
have a preface and one was considered necessary for the work to appear
in print. Pierre’s death before the volume appeared in print presented the
impossibility of an epistle by him being added at this later stage. Jacques’s
authorship of the epistle demonstrates that the compilation of the book
was very much a collaborative family project founded on shared moral
values and common textual interests.
The Briefve instruction is described simply as ‘envoyee par ledict [Pierre]
de Changy. A seur Francoyse de Changy sa fille Religieuse a saincte Claire
de Bourges’ [Brief instruction sent by the aforementioned de Changy to
sister Francoyse de Changy his daughter Nun at Saint Claire de Bourges].23
However, evidence from the text itself suggests that this was a meditation
that was composed specifically for her use. The subject matter is wholly
appropriate for her religious vocation. In addition, the use of ‘briefve’ in
the text’s title echoes both the more limited educational aspirations for
women.24
22 Institution de la femme chrestienne, S5 verso.

23 Institution de la femme chrestienne, S7 recto.
24 According to Vives: ‘Ad hoc, ut virorum numerosæ sint, feminarum certe mores
paucissimus formari præceptis possunt. Quoniam viri et domi et foris et in re publica
versantur; ideo quæ ratio sit tantæ diversitatis officiorum non nisi longis voluminibus
explicatur’ [In addition, although rules of conduct for men are numerous, the moral
formation of women can be parted with very few precepts, since men are occupied
20 Pollie Bromilow
It is interesting to note that Changy chose to compose a separate

work for his daughter who had taken holy orders rather than, for example,
dedicating the Institution de la femme chrestienne to his daughters jointly
or indeed to Francoyse alone. González González has pointed out that
the Vives text differed from its medieval predecessors by not according a
place to convent life but rather conceiving of women’s education taking
place within the family home:
Medieval writers on the education of women, like Francesc Eiximenis, spoke about
the young unmarried girl, the married woman, the widow and the nun. Vives passed
over the last option in silence, since he assigned a completely secular role to women,
in the bosom of the family, with no option for the convent.25
By composing a text for his daughter which emphasized her location behind
convent walls, Changy was certainly reflecting the configuration of his
own family, but he may also have been attempting to repair the lacuna in
the Vives text.
The final lines of the treatise convey the sense that this devotional
and educational text is also a personal act of commemoration: ‘Dieu vous
doint grace le suyvre en tel estime que vostre feu mere, laquelle je vous prye
ne mettre en obly en voz oraisons quotidiennes. Amen’. [God give you
the grace to follow him in the same esteem as your late mother, whom I
would ask you never to forget in your daily prayers. Amen.]’26 This phrase
acts as a multiple commemoration of Changy family members. Firstly,
Pierre entreats his daughter to follow the example of her late mother in
worshipping God. Secondly, he asks her to remember her mother in her
daily prayers. Finally, given that the volume as a whole was printed after
his death, the treatise acts as a memorial to the love, care and moral guid-
ance that he extended to his daughter during his lifetime. A similar tone
both within the house and outside it, in public and in private, and for that reason it
requires lengthy volumes to explain the norms to be observed in such varied duties].
Vives, De institutione feminæ Christianæ, §3.
25 González González, ‘Fame and Oblivion’, p. 365.
26 Institution de la femme chrestienne, T6 verso.
is struck in his epistle to Marguerite when he foresees how the text he has
translated will be useful to her throughout her life:
Esperant que par la recordation des enseignemens d’icelluy, tu augmenteras ta vertu

et renom, tant en l’aage nubile auquel tu es de praesent que en autre estat quant tu y
parviendras, et qu’il sera besoing d’enseigner les autres, si tu en as charge.
[Hoping that in remembering the teachings in this [book], you will develop your
virtue and reputation, as much as in the young age that you are in now as in any
other state that you arrive in and if you need to teach others if you have charge
of them.]27
Here Pierre’s aspirations for Marguerite extend beyond her own education
to include the possibility that she will one day be responsible for the moral
development of others, either her own children or possibly servants.28 In
this way, Marguerite comes to represent a universal female reader who
will find the book of value and interest irrespective of her age or marital
status.
Read together, the prefaces of the 1543 Kerver edition of the Institution
de la femme chrestienne demonstrate the role that Changy saw for his trans-
lations in furthering the moral and educational aspirations for his children,
especially his daughters, at a time when no other works by living authors
addressed these topics so comprehensively in the vernacular. Furthermore,
they illuminate the ways in which the anthology of educational texts he
collected together acted as a memorial of his life and pedagogical influence
over his family after his death.
27 Institution de la femme chrestienne, A5 verso.

28 Conduct literature for women frequently alludes to what Murphy has called the
‘transformative power of feminine virtue’, that is, the ability of women to educate
those in their social networks. Virtuous Necessity, p. 34. For a discussion of this in
English-language conduct literature see Murphy, Virtuous Necessity, esp. Chapter 2:
‘“Honest Government”: Feminine Virtue’s Network of Influence in Early Modern
England’.
22 Pollie Bromilow
The Institution de la femme chrestienne from

Manuscript to Print
Thus far we have seen the manner in which the Institution de la femme
chrestienne offers us an insight into the ways that texts were circulated and
read by a family from the administrative classes. In their translation from
Latin to the vernacular, these texts made journeys from the capital to the
provinces, from urban Dijon to rural Changy, from the library of a legal
officeholder into the hands of a young female reader and her female entou-
rage and from secular society to the cloisters beyond convent walls. One
final way in which these texts travelled is on their transformative journey
from manuscript to print.
The links between the Institution de la femme chrestienne and manu-
script culture can be explored through the inclusion of the third text, an
unattributed French translation of the Pseudo-Bernhardine Epistola de cura
rei familiaris. According to Mark Kauntze it was the work most frequently
attributed to ‘Bernard’:
The Epistola de cura rei familiaris […] survives in hundreds of manuscripts, including
vernacular translations. The letter is addressed from a certain ‘Bernardus’, and later
copyists often took this to be Bernard Silvestris (perhaps because he was a known
authority on the ars dictaminis) or else Bernard of Clairvaux.29
The translation is presumed to be by Changy himself, although it is not

attributed to him in the paratexts. According to Paul Chavy, the inclusion
of the Epistola de cura rei familiaris in the volume with the Institution de la
femme chrestienne was the first time that a translation of the text had been
printed in the sixteenth century.30 The previous printed translation dated
29 Kauntze, Authority and Imitation, p. 26.

30 Paul Chavy, Traducteurs d’autrefois, Moyen Age et Renaissance: Dictionnaire des tra-
ducteurs et de la littérature traduite en ancien et moyen français, 842–1600, ed. Paul
Chavy, 2 vols (Paris and Geneva: Champion and Slatkine, 1988), I, 172–8; 334.
from 1487.31 Chavy notes that many more texts attributed to Bernard of
Clairvaux are found in manuscripts than printed books of the period.32 It is
therefore interesting to consider why it was considered an appropriate text
to include in the Institution de la femme chrestienne. In what ways was this
thirteenth-century text that spoke to the medieval and manuscript tradi-
tions considered a textual companion in a printed book which contained
two translations of leading humanist treatises and an original composition
by the translator? The Epistola de cura rei familiaris was one of the most
famous short texts on household management in medieval France. It was
not only suitable for inclusion in a ‘livre domestique’ for this reason, but
also because, having circulated so widely in manuscript miscellanies of the
period, the text would likely still have been found in many sixteenth-century
households. It is interesting to note that, unlike the other two texts that
he has translated, Changy does not give an explanation of how the epistle
came into his possession.
An example of how the vernacular translation of the Epistola de cura
rei familiaris circulated alongside other texts of pedagogical value in the
fifteenth century can be found in Paris, BnF fr. 1551. The manuscript contains
fourteen main items, the last three of which appear to have been added by a
later hand. Included in the book are a number of devotional or pedagogical
pieces by well-known authors including the Testament and Petit Codicille
attributed to Jean de Meun, Christine de Pizan’s Enseignements moraux,
Jean Lefèvre de Ressons’s translation of the Catonis disticha, La Somme
le Roi by Laurent d’Orléans and the Ordonnances et commandements of
Enguerran de Monstrelet as well as Jean Gerson’s A B C des simples gens,
Science de bien mourir and Instruction pour la confession.
Karen Fresco’s study of this manuscript places it within a tradition of
‘catechetical and penitential literature being circulated in the vernacular
languages to the lay public’.33 Her essay does not include analysis of the
31 The earliest surviving edition is listed in USTC as Le Regime de menage (Besançon:

[Petrus Metlinger, 1487]; USTC 70891).
32 Chavy, Traducteurs d’autrefois, I, 172.
33 Karen Fresco ‘Christine de Pizan’s Enseignemens moraulx in the Order of Texts of
Paris, BnF fr. 1551’, in Christine de Pizan: Une femme de science, Une femme de lettres.
24 Pollie Bromilow
Pseudo-Bernhardine epistle. Here, as in the Institution de la femme chres-

tienne, it would seem to be a minor text included alongside much more
famous companions towards the end of the volume. However, the miscel-
lany does share some important characteristics with the Changy volume.
One of the most significant aspects would seem to be the way in which
Paris, BnF fr. 1551 foregrounds the role of women. Gerson’s texts ‘include a
systematic address to both men and women’.34 Furthermore, Christine de
Pizan’s Enseignements moraux represent Christine as a mother giving advice
to her son. We can see an obvious parallel between this construction of
mother as advisor and the paternal role played by Changy in the prefaces
and translations of the Institution de la femme chrestienne.
Other studies of household, devotional and pedagogical manuscript
miscellanies in the fifteenth century display even more similarities between
these pre-existing modes of textual transmission and the printed Institution
de la femme chrestienne. Amanda Moss’s study of a household manuscript
miscellany produced in fifteenth-century London has revealed certain
key features of these works that we can also discern in Changy’s volume.35
According to Moss, MS Westminster 3, a miscellany of eighteen devotional
and conduct texts, was ‘in keeping with the fashion for devotional mis-
cellanies and common-profit books circulating among London merchant
families from the early fifteenth century onwards’.36 Similar to Changy’s
aspiration to educate Marguerite’s extended family network through his
translation of the De institutione feminæ Christianæ, these manuscript mis-
cellanies responded to a perceived civic responsibility to educate. This
involved commissioning manuscript copies of key texts and also specifying
how they should be circulated.37 As Moss has said, by so doing,
Études reunies par Juliette Dor et Marie-Elisabeth Henneau avec la collaboration de

Bernard Ribemont (Paris: Champion, 2008), pp. 289–303, p. 290.
34 Fresco, ‘Christine de Pizan’, p. 296.
35 Amanda Moss, ‘A Merchant’s Tales: A London Fifteenth-Century Household
Miscellany’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 33 (2003), 156–69.
36 Moss, ‘A Merchant’s Tales’, p. 158.
37 Moss cites the example of Cambridge University Library Ff.6.31, financed by the estate
of John Colop with the instruction that it be circulated from reader to reader whether
male or female for the entire life of the book. Moss, ‘A Merchant’s Tales’, p. 158.
London merchants were not only contributing to the charitable provision of books
for poorer lay people, but also ensuring the dissemination of instructional texts
that upheld their own ideals, reinforcing their view of the proper order of urban
medieval society.38
We can see the same civic aspirations in the uses that Changy foresees for
his texts amongst a readership that extends beyond his own immediate
family. In the dedication to Marguerite, for example, he writes how he
has translated the De institutione feminæ Christianæ into French ‘pour
ton instruction, et [la] lecture de noz parentes’ [for your education and
for our female relatives to read].39 The use of ‘parentes’ as opposed to
‘parents’ shows that he has a particular female readership in mind for
his translation. This reference to a readership beyond his offspring may
also be an allusive way of indicating his anticipation and approval of the
work’s circulation in print. It is worth reflecting here on how the prefaces
to the texts in the book have presented the Changy family’s role in the
community. By emphasizing the occupations of Pierre, Blaise and Jacques
we come to view them as highly literate and professionally and socially
active in the urban and intellectual centres of Dijon and Paris. Through
the descriptions of the genesis of the translations in the prefaces to the
texts we also come to consider Pierre, Blaise and Jacques as exemplary
citizens who work together for the common purpose of bringing Latin
texts to a vernacular-reading public.
The London merchant miscellanies also share with the texts in the
Institution de la femme chrestienne their status as memorials. Moss states
that the common-profit books were funded by testamentary charity and
‘usually contained inscriptions urging the recipient to pray for the soul of
their benefactor’.40 We have seen in Changy’s dedication to his daughter
in the convent at St Bourges that the idea of the memorial is also strongly
present in the Institution de la femme chrestienne. In addition, the fact that
Pierre de Changy died before the appearance of the first printed edition

39 Institution de la femme chrestienne, A5 recto.
Another random document with
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Mr. Trimblerigg did not in after days actually set fire to anything in
order that he might come running to the rescue when rescue was too
late; but he did inflame many a situation seven times more than it
was wont to be inflamed, setting people by the ears, and causing
many an uprooting in places where no replanting could avail. And
when he had got matters thus thoroughly involved, he would apply
thereto his marvellous powers of accommodation and persuasion,
and, if some sort of peace and order did thereafter emerge, regard
himself quite genuinely as the deliverer.
At a later date his zeal for the Lord’s House broke up the Free United
Evangelicals into separate groups of an unimportant size, which
when they seemed about to disappear wholly from view, he reunited
again; and having for the moment redoubled what was left, regarded
his work as good, though in the religious world the Free Evangelicals
had forfeited thenceforth their old priority of place, a circumstance
from which (when convinced of its permanence) he made his
personal escape by embracing second Adventism. And though
doubtless he carried his Free Evangelism with him into the field of
modern prophecy, the Free Evangelicals within their own four walls
knew him no more. Very effectively he had burnt them out, and in
their case no insurance policy provided for the rebuilding: in that seat
of the mighty, probed by the beams of a new day, only the elderly
grey ashes remained of men whose word once gave light.
CHAPTER THREE
Trial and Error
AT a very early stage in his career, before his theological training
had overtly begun, the moral consciousness of Mr. Trimblerigg was
far more accurately summed up in the words, ‘Thou, Davidina, seest
me,’ than in the more generally accepted text which shone with
symbolic rays from an illuminated scroll hung over his bed. That text
with its angel faces and gold edgings did not pierce the joints of his
harness, to the discovery of vulnerable spots, with the same sharp
efficiency as did the dark watchful eye of Davidina.
As he entered into his ’teens with the instinct for spiritual adventure
growing strong, he had an uncomfortable sense of transparency
where Davidina was concerned—or rather where she was not
concerned but chose to intrude—which made him cease to feel a
self-contained person. If there was anyone in the world who knew
him—not as he wished to be known, but as in his more disconcerted
moments he sometimes suspected himself to be—it was Davidina.
Under the fixture of her eye he lost confidence; its calm quizzical
gaze tripped his thoughts, and checked the flow of his words:
initiative and invention went out of him.
The result was truly grievous, for though he could do without self-
respect for quite long intervals, self-complacency was the necessary
basis for every action. Davidina deprived him of that.
Her power was horrible; she could do it in a momentary look, in a
single word; it seemed to be her mission in life, whenever he
whitewashed the window of his soul for better privacy, to scratch a
hole and look through.
When, for instance, he first experimented in kissing outside the
routine of family life, Davidina seemed by instinct to know of it.
Secretively, in the presence of their elders, she held him with her
eye, pursed her lips, and made the kissing sound; then, before he
could compose a countenance suitable to meet the charge, her
glance shot off and left him. For Davidina was a sleek adept in giving
that flick of the eye which does not wait for the repartee; though on
other occasions, when her eye definitely challenged him, there was
no bearing it down; it stabbed, it stuck, it went in, and came at his
back.
It was in these wordless encounters that she beat him worst; till Mr.
Trimblerigg, conscious of his inferiority, went and practised at the
glass a gesture which he hoped thereby to make more effective—a
lifting of the nose, a slight closing of the eyelids, a polished putting-
off of the hands, deprecatory but bland; and a smile to show that he
was not hurt. But the first time he used it upon her was also the last.
‘Did you practise that in the glass?’ said Davidina; and the gesture
died the death.
Truly at that time of her life he wanted her to die, and slightly
damped her shoes on the inside after they had been cleaned, that
they might help her to do so. But it was no good; without saying
anything, she damped his also, rather more emphatically, so that
there could be no mistake; whereas his damping was so delicately
done that she ought not to have found it out.
The most afflictive thing about these encounters was his constant
failure to score a victory; only once, in the affair of the pocket-money
already narrated, had he succeeded in holding his own. Perhaps it
was all for the good of his soul; for in matters of finance his sense of
probity remained in after years somewhat defective; victory over
Davidina in that respect had apparently done him no good. But in
other directions she continued to do her best to save his soul; and
though he was now committed to the ministry, and was himself to
become a soul-saving apparatus, he did not like her way of doing it;
temperamentally (and was there ever a character more largely
composed of temperament?) he would much rather have gone his
own way and been damned, than saved by Davidina on the lines she
chose. She stung him like a gad-fly in his weakest spots, till the
unerring accuracy of her aim filled him with a superstitious dread;
and though never once uttered in words, ‘Thou, Davidina, seest me,’
was the motive force which thus early drove him so deeply and
deviously into subterfuge that it became an infection of his blood.
And though against her it availed little, in other directions, pricked to
it by her incessant skill, he had a quite phenomenal success, and
was—up to a point—the nimblest being that ever skipped from cover
to open and from open to cover, till, in the development of speed, he
ceased to distinguish which was which; and what he told would tell
with the most complete conviction that, if it told to his advantage, it
must be truth; and then, on occasion, would avail himself of the truth
to such dazzling effect that, lost in the blaze of his rectitude, he
forgot those other occasions when he had been truer to himself.
Of Davidina’s inspired pin-pricks here is an example, notable for the
early date of its delivery, when they were at the respective ages of
twelve and eleven. Brother and sister had fallen out in guessing at
an event as to which with probability all the other way, Davidina
proved to be right. Not believing this to be a guess, ‘You knew!’ he
cried indignantly.
‘I didn’t,’ she replied smoothly, ‘I only knew better.’
This was superfluous: it enabled Mr. Trimblerigg to get in with a
retort. ‘Even very conceited people,’ he said, ‘do sometimes manage
to guess right.’
Davidina recovered her ground. ‘I’m not as conceited as you,’ she
replied, ‘I never think myself good.’ It was the sticking-out of her
tongue, and adding ‘so there’! which gave the barb to those words.
At the earliest opportunity Mr. Trimblerigg retired to consider them. It
was evident that Davidina had penetrated another of his secrets; she
had discovered that he thought himself good. Many years after,
when asked by an American reporter what it felt like to be the
greatest man in the world, he replied that it made him feel shy, and
then was ready to bite his tongue out for having so aimed at modesty
and missed. He saw twenty reporters writing down the words, ‘It
makes me feel shy’; and within twelve hours it was all over the world
—a mistake which he couldn’t explain away. That was to be one of
the worst moments of his life; and this was another, that Davidina
should have unearthed so hidden and central a truth. He was deeply
annoyed, partly with her for having discovered it, much more with
himself for having let it appear.
Yet his cogitations brought him in the end to a conclusion which had
in it a measure of comfort. ‘After all,’ he said to himself, ‘I am good
sometimes.’
It was that ‘sometimes,’ and the consciousness of it, that in the future
was to work havoc with his soul. He did know desperately well that
he was good sometimes; and the fervour of it used to spread so far
beyond the appointed limit that he ceased to know where his
goodness began, and where it left off. As from an oasis in the
wilderness exhales fragrance from the blossom of the rose, regaling
the dusty nostrils of sand-bound travellers, as into its airy horizon
ascends mirage from waters, and palm-trees, and temples, that are
real somewhere—but not in the place where they so phenomenally
display themselves—so from parts of him excellent, into other parts
less excellent, went the sense that he was ‘somehow good’; and he
never perceived, in spite of the very genuine interest he took in
himself that what made him more interesting than anyone else was
the extraordinary division of his character into two parts, a good and
a bad, so dexterously allied that they functioned together as one,
endowing him with that curious gift of sincerity to each mood while it
lasted, which kept him ever true to himself and the main chance,
even as the bits of glass in a kaleidoscope always shape to patterns,
however varied, having the same fixed centre—a haphazard
orderliness which no amount of shaking can destroy.
As has been hinted already, a time unavoidable for youth came in
Mr. Trimblerigg’s life when kisses began to have an attraction for
him: in his case it came rather early, and the attraction grew strong.
But so also grew his fear of them—or perhaps it would be more true
to say his fear lest Davidina should get wind of them. Davidina had
an unlovable scorn for kisses, which she paraded to the world; she
kissed nobody except her parents, and them only from a sense of
duty, and became known, in a country-side where kisses were easily
come by, as the girl from whom nobody could get a kiss.
Few tried; the first who did so had been made a warning for others.
It is likely enough—since moral emblems have their contrary effect—
that the impregnable barrier set up by Davidina was responsible for
the thing becoming so much a vogue in other quarters; and Lizzie
Seebohm, the prettiest small wench of the village, in pure derision of
Davidina’s aloofness, and under her very eyes, made open sale of
her kisses at a price which, starting from chocolates, rose to a penny
and thence to twopence.
For this amiable weakness she got from Davidina the nickname of
‘Tuppenny,’ and in view of the feud which thence arose, Mr.
Trimblerigg was instinctively advised of danger to his peace of mind
if he put himself on Tuppenny’s list. And so it came about that,
whatever his natural inclinations in the matter, he saved his pocket-
money and did not apply for her favours.
In this Lizzie Seebohm saw the influence of Davidina; for which
reason and sheer spitefulness, Mr. Trimblerigg became her quarry.
So one day a communication reached him, artfully told by the small
maiden commissioned thereto as a breach of confidence. She had
heard Lizzie say that Jonathan might have a kiss of her not merely
for nothing; she would give twopence to get it. A sense that he was
really attractive made him fail to see deep enough, and when the
offer rose to sixpence he succumbed.
Within an hour—Lizzie Seebohm had seen to it—Davidina got the
news. Her wrath and sense of humiliation were deep; in the great
battle of life which lay ahead for the possession of her brother’s soul,
she had lost a point, and that to an opponent whom she regarded as
insignificant. It was not a case for silence. Davidina descended upon
him before the sixpence in his pocket had had time to get warm.
‘You’ve been kissing Tuppenny!’ she cried.
‘Who says?’ he demanded, scared at discovery so swift. Then,
bettering his defence: ‘Tuppenny, indeed! she’s not worth it. I haven’t
given her tuppence; I haven’t given her a penny. I haven’t given her
anything, so there! If she says I have, she’s a liar.’
This seemed almost conclusive; Davidina’s faith in the report
wavered. But whenever Jonathan was voluble she distrusted him; so
now.
‘It isn’t her word I’m going by,’ she said. ‘Somebody saw you.’
Mr. Trimblerigg’s mind made an alert movement—very characteristic.
He was not ashamed of what he had done; he only didn’t like being
caught.
‘You said Tuppenny,’ he retorted. ‘And I say—I didn’t give her
tuppence.’
Davidina pressed him along the track, as he meant her to. ‘Then
what did you give her?’
‘I didn’t give her anything; I’ve told you so already. She gave me
sixpence.’
His tone was triumphant, for now, in his own time and in his own
way, he had made a clean breast of it. Davidina’s face was a study.
‘Sold again!’ he said, watching the effect; and curiously he did not
mean himself, or his virtue, or anything else belonging to him; he
meant Davidina. Having got ahead of her with the facts, he
considered himself top-dog for that once at least.
But within a few hours of that avowal an amazing thing happened. It
happened during the night; for when he went to bed the sixpence
was in his trouser pocket, and when he got up in the morning it was
gone; nor did he dare to tax Davidina with the theft.
In chapel, the next Sunday, when the plate came round for foreign
missions, Davidina with ostentation put sixpence into it. Is it to be
wondered that, before the week was over, he had got sixpence back
from somewhere, and took care that Davidina should see him
spending it. Davidina meant well, I am sure; but it is to be questioned
whether her method of clipping his wings was the right one. He
became tangential to the orbit of her spells; they touched, but they
did not contain him.
Meanwhile, without Davidina’s aid, even without her approval, Mr.
Trimblerigg’s call to the ministry was becoming more assured. And
the question mainly was whether, in that family of cramped means,
money could be found in the years lying immediately ahead to
provide the necessary training. It meant two years spent mainly
away from home at the Free Evangelical Training College; two years
of escape from Davidina for whole months at a time; it meant leaving
home a boy and coming back very nearly a man. Even had the
ministry not appealed to him, it would have been worth it for the
peculiar attraction of those circumstances.
Whether this could become practically possible depended mainly
upon old Uncle Trimblerigg—Uncle Trimblerigg whose investments
in house property had been inspired by holy scripture, but whose
theological tenets were of a kind for which up-to-date Free
Evangelicalism no longer provided the college or the training. Nor did
he believe that either college or training were necessary for the
preaching of the Word. He had done it himself for fifty years, merely
by opening the book where it wished to be opened and pondering
what was thus presented. The verbal inspiration of Scripture, not
merely in its writing but in its presentation to the sense of the true
believer, was the very foundation of his faith. The sect of ‘the True
Believers’ had of late years sadly diminished; for as all True
Believers believed that while they believed truly they could never
make a mistake in their interpretations of Scripture, it became as
time went on dangerous for them to meet often or to exchange
pulpits, since, where one was found differing from another, mutual
excommunication of necessity followed and they walked no more in
each other’s ways. Only at their great annual congress did they meet
to reaffirm the foundation of their faith and thunder with a united
voice the Word which did not change.
Thus it came about that dotted over the country were many chapels
of True Believers cut off from friendly intercourse with any other by
mutual interdict; and the hill-side chapel of Uncle Trimblerigg—built
by himself for a congregation of some twenty families all told, his
tenants, or his dependents in the building trade—was one of them.
So among the True Believers there was small prospect of a career
for the budding Mr. Trimblerigg; and yet it was upon the financial aid
and favour of one of them that he depended for theological training
in a direction which they disapproved.
It speaks well for the sanguine temperament and courage of our own
Mr. Trimblerigg that the prospect did not dismay him, or even, in the
event, present much difficulty.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Beard of the Prophet
UNCLE PHINEAS, the uncle of Mr. Trimblerigg’s father, lived at an
elevation, both physical and spiritual, among the stone quarries a-top
of the village. His house and the chapel where he ministered stood
adjoining, both of his own building; and in the days when Jonathan
knew him he was seldom seen leaving the one except to go to the
other. For he was now very old, and having made his money and
retired from business, he had only one interest left in life, the
preaching of the strict tenets of True Belief to the small congregation
which had trickled under him for the last fifty years.
The True Believers had a worship which was all their own; they
flocked by themselves, never going elsewhere, though others
sometimes came to them. No instrument of music was allowed within
their dwelling, nor did they sing—anything that could be called a
tune. When their voices were lifted in praise they bleated upon a
single note, which now and again they changed, going higher and
higher, and when they could go no higher they stopped.
To our own Mr. Trimblerigg this form of worship was terrible; he liked
music and he liked tunes; diversity attracted him; and here, by every
possible device, diversity was ruled out. But the importance of Uncle
Phineas, both present and prospective, obliged certain members of
the Trimblerigg family to ascend once at least every Sunday, to hear
him preach and pray, and though none of them professed an
exclusive conversion to the teaching of the True Believers, they kept
an open mind about it, and listened respectfully to all that Uncle
Phineas had to say.
Lay-preaching and the ministry of the Word ran strong in the
Trimblerigg family, also in that of the Hubbacks, to which on his
mother’s side Jonathan belonged; and had he cared to divide
himself spiritually among his relations there were five sects from
which to choose—a division of creeds which did not amount to
much, except in the case of the True Believers. Grandfather
Hubback, between whom and Uncle Phineas there was theological
war, ministered to the Free Evangelicals at the Bethesda which
Jonathan had helped to renovate; Uncle James was a Primitive
Brother; Uncle Jonah a First Resurrectionist; his Sunday exercise—
the practising of the Last Trump—a welcome relief perhaps, from his
weekday occupation of undertaker. Mr. Trimblerigg, during his
childhood, had sat under all of them; the difference being that under
his Uncle Phineas he had been made to sit. Then came the question
of his own call to the ministry, and the further question as to ways
and means. It was from then on that Mr. Trimblerigg went more
constantly and willingly to hear the doctrine of the True Believers,
and began to display towards it something wider than an open mind.
At the age of fifteen he had got into the habit of going to see and
hear his uncle on weekdays as well, and very quietly he would
endure for hours together while the old man expounded his
unchangeable theology.
Everything about Uncle Phineas was long, including his discourses.
He had a long head, a long nose, a long upper lip and a long chin. To
these his beard served as a corrective; long also, it stuck out at right
angles from his face, till with the weight of its projection it began to
droop; at that point he trimmed it hard and square, making no
compromise, and if none admired it except its owner, it was at least
in character. With such a beard you could not kiss people, and
Phineas Trimblerigg was not of a mind to kiss anybody. In spite of
old age, it retained a hue which suggested a too hasty breakfast of
under-boiled egg; while trying to become grey it remained
reminiscently golden.
And the beard symbolized the man; square, blunt and upright,
patriarchal in mind and character, he lived in a golden age of the
past—the age of romantic theology before science had come to
disturb it. His only Tree of Knowledge was the Bible, and this not
only in matters of doctrine; it was his tree of genealogy and history
as well. From its topmost branch he surveyed a world six thousand
years old, of six days making, and all the wonders that followed,—
the Flood, the Tower whose height had threatened Heaven, and the
plagues, pestilences and famines, loosed by an outraged Deity on a
stubborn but chosen people, and the sun and the moon which stood
still to assist in tribal slaughter, and the special vehicles provided for
prophets, at one time a chariot of fire, at another a great fish, at
another a talking ass,—all these things gave him no mental trouble
whatever; but joy rather, and confidence, and an abiding faith. He
believed them literally, and had required that his family should
believe them too. And truly he could say that, in one way or another,
he had to begin with made them all God-fearing. If in the process five
had died young, and one run away to sea and got drowned, and
another fallen into evil courses from which he had not returned alive,
so that Phineas in his old age was left childless—all this had but
made him more patriarchal in outlook than ever, turning his attention
upon nephews and nieces of the second generation, especially upon
one; which, indeed, is the reason why here he becomes an important
character.
Fortified by fifty years of prudent investment based upon revelation,
and with a comfortable balance at his bank, he cast his other cares
upon the Lord; lived frugally, gave a just tithe of all he possessed to
the foreign and home missions of the True Believers, drank no wine
or strong drink—except tea, denounced the smoking of tobacco, but
took it as snuff, believed firmly in Hell, war, and corporal punishment
for men, women and children alike, was still an elected, though a
non-attending, member of all local bodies, but in the parliamentary
election (regarding it as the evil thing) would take no part. To him life,
in the main, meant theology.
At the now sharply dividing ways he stood with old Pastor Hubback
(or rather against him) a leading and a rival light among the local
Free Churches; and because he had money to give and to leave he
was still a power in the district as well as in his own family. This was
the oracle to which Mr. Trimblerigg, in his fifteenth year, began to
give up his half-holidays.
Uncle Phineas was always at home; he had legs which never
allowed him to get farther than his own gate, except once a week to
the Tabernacle of True Belief, of which he was minister and owner.
The larger chapel in the village lower down had not known him for
thirty years when the youthful Jonathan first became aware of his
importance, and began under parental direction to pay a weekly call
at ‘Pisgah,’ and there learn from the old patriarch things about
himself and others, including God, to which he listened with an air of
great respect and interest.
Jonathan’s way with him was wily but simple: he would ask a great
number of intelligent questions, and receiving unintelligent answers
would appear satisfied. Now and then, upon his birthday, or when
revivalism was in the air, the old man would give him sixpence,
sometimes even a shilling, advising him to bestow it upon the foreign
missions of the stricter Evangelicals, especially those to the native
races of Central Africa and America, where the undiluted truth of the
Word had still necessarily to be taught. For those primitive minds the
taint of modernism had no effect; Heaven had so shaped them to the
divine purpose that nothing short of literal True Belief could touch
their hearts and soften their understandings. And the old man would
talk wondrously to Jonathan of how, in the evil days to come, these
black races were destined to become the repository of the true faith
and reconvert the world to the purer doctrine.
Uncle Phineas was on the look-out for punishment on a world-wide
scale, and had he lived to see it, the War of Versailles would have
gladdened his heart. For he wanted all the Nations to be punished,
including his own,—a point on which Mr. Trimblerigg ventured
privately to differ from him; being in that matter a Free Evangelical,
and preferring Heaven to Hell. Uncle Phineas preferred Hell;
punishment was owing, and the imaginary infliction of it was what in
the main attracted him to religion.
Punishment: first and foremost for man’s breaking of the Sabbath;
then followed in order drink, horse-racing, gambling, the increase of
divorces, modernism, and the higher criticism, with all its resultant
forms of infidelity, the agitation for Women’s Suffrage, and finally the
impious attempt of Labour to depose Capital.
All these things were of the Devil and must be fought; and in the
discussion of them Jonathan began—not to be in a difficulty because
some of them made an appeal to his dawning intelligence, but to
become agile. Luckily for him Uncle Phineas’s information was very
nearly as narrow as his intelligence, and Mr. Trimblerigg was able to
jump to and fro across his sedentary and parochial mind with small
fear of discovery. But the repeated interviews made him brisk,
supple, and conversationally adaptable; and once when the old man
remarked half-approvingly, ‘Aye, Jonathan, you’ve got eyes in your
head, but don’t let ’em out by the back door,’ he had a momentary
qualm lest behind that observation dangerous knowledge might lurk.
But it was only his uncle’s constitutional disapproval of a mind that
could move; and of Jonathan’s outside doings and opinions he had
at that time heard nothing to rouse suspicion. But clearly when Mr.
Trimblerigg was called to the ministry and began to preach there
would be a difficulty; for what would go down at Bethesda among the
Free Evangelicals, where his obvious career was awaiting him,
would not do up at Horeb, the chapel on the hill; and it was well
within the bounds of possibility that owing to his family connections
Mr. Trimblerigg might find it advantageous to preach at both.
That, however, was a problem still lying some few years away;
meanwhile Uncle Phineas might very reasonably die; and it was just
about this time that I heard Mr. Trimblerigg beginning to pray for
peace to the old man in his declining years, that he might not be kept
unduly on the rack of this tough world after so good a life.
And indeed it was a life in which he had accomplished much; for a
man of his small beginnings he had become of notable substance,
and his income derived from quarries and the houses he had built for
his workers was reckoned to amount to anything from six to eight
hundred a year, of which, in spite of generous gifts to foreign
missions, he did not spend one-half.
His expectant relatives did not talk among themselves about the
matter where, of necessity, interests were divided; but they thought
much, and occasionally they had their fears.
‘I shouldn’t wonder,’ said Jonathan’s father one day, ‘if when Uncle
dies it isn’t found that he had an unsound mind.’
It was to obviate such a calamity that Jonathan was sent to pay his
weekly visit, and that one or another of the family, at least once
every Sunday, went up to Horeb to pray.
Quite early in his examination of the tenets of True Belief, anxious
that she should keep him in countenance, Mr. Trimblerigg asked
Davidina what she thought of them.
‘My belief is,’ said Davidina, ‘that we can all believe what we want to
believe; and if you only believe it enough, it comes true—for you, at
any rate. You can believe every word of the Bible is true, or that
every word of it is false; and either way, you can live up to it. The
True Believers are right there, anyway. And if,’ she added, ‘you’ve
got nothing else to believe, you can believe in yourself: and you can
smile at yourself in the glass, and look at your teeth, and think they
are milestones on the road to Heaven, till they all drop out.
Believing’s easy; it’s choosing what you mean to believe that
matters. I believe the kettle’s boiling over.’
She went, leaving Mr. Trimblerigg to his meditations, also to a doubt
whether she had taken him quite seriously.
With his Uncle Phineas it was all the other way; they were nothing if
not serious together; but it often puzzled his ingenuous mind how his
uncle managed to believe all the things he did.
One day: ‘Uncle Phineas,’ he said, ‘how did you come to be a True
Believer?’
‘When I felt the need of conversion as a young man,’ replied Uncle
Phineas, ‘I started reading the Scriptures. Every day, before I
opened the book, I said, “Lord, help me to believe!” And by the time
I’d read ’em three times through, I believed every word.’
‘I’ve only read them twice yet,’ said Jonathan in meek admission, but
glad to get hold of the excuse.
‘Read ’em again,’ said his uncle.
‘And all the genealogies, too, Uncle?’ he inquired, for all the world as
though he felt genuinely committed to the task if the other should say
‘yes.’
‘Why would you leave them out?’ queried his uncle. ‘It’s the sowing
of the seed. When you sow a field, you’ve not to care about this
grain or that, picking and choosing: it’s the sowing that matters. Sow
your mind with the seed of the Word, and don’t leave gaps. You
never know how you may come to need it hereafter. “Abram begat
Isaac; and Isaac married Rebecca, and begat Jacob:”—that was the
text the Lord showed me when He would have me choose a wife,
whose name was Rebecca.’ He fetched a sigh. ‘And I did,’ he said.
‘She was a poor weak wife to me, and the children took after her; so
now not one of them is left. It was the Lord’s will.’
‘But if you had married some one else, wouldn’t it have been the
Lord’s will too?’ inquired Jonathan.
‘That we won’t discuss,’ said his uncle. ‘I shouldn’t have chosen
without first looking to Scripture. There was only one Rebecca in the
village, and I hadn’t thought of her till then. ’Twas a marvellous
showing, and she on a bed of sickness at the time.’
Mr. Trimblerigg was properly impressed; but he doubted whether he
would choose his own wife that way, even should he become a True
Believer. So, not to linger on doubtful ground, he changed the
subject and began to ask about missionaries; having a wish to see
the world, they attracted him.
‘If I become a True Believer,’ he said, ‘I shan’t stay and preach in one
place; I shall go out and preach everywhere.’
‘You’ll do as the Lord tells you,’ said his uncle. ‘It’s no good one
that’s not a True Believer talking of what he’ll do when he becomes
one.’
‘No, Uncle,’ said Jonathan meekly, still out to do business; ‘but living
at home makes it very hard for me. I’m much nearer to being a True
Believer than Mother is, or Father, or Davidina. Davidina says you
can believe anything if you’ll only make yourself. She says she could
make herself believe that the Bible was all false, if she were to try.’
‘Has she tried, does she mean?’ inquired Uncle Phineas grimly.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Jonathan ingenuously. ‘It would be very wicked
if anyone did try, wouldn’t it?’
‘It would,’ said his uncle. ‘I’ve known men struck down dead for less.
I knew a man once who tore a leaf out of his Bible to light his pipe
with, and he was struck by lightning for it the same day. Yet his sin
was only against one leaf, one chapter. How much greater the sin if
you sin against the whole of it. She thought that, did she? When you
go home, send Davidina up to me: I’ll talk to her.’
Then Mr. Trimblerigg had a divided mind; for his fear of Davidina was
not less but rather more than his fear of Uncle Phineas. Indeed he
only feared Uncle Phineas for what he might fail to do for him in the
near future, but Davidina he feared for what she was, here and now.
‘I think, perhaps, Davidina only meant—anybody who was wicked
enough. But please don’t tell Davidina that I said anything!’
‘Heh?’ cried Uncle Phineas, his eye suspicious: ‘That so? We’ll see.’
He got up, went slowly to his Bible and opened it and without looking
put down his thumb.
‘Listen to this, Jonathan,’ he said; and in solemn tone and with long
pauses, he read:
“She put her hand to the nail ... and her right hand to the workman’s
hammer ... and with the hammer she smote Sisera, she smote off his
head ... when she had pierced and stricken through his temples.”...
You hear that, Jonathan?’
‘Yes, Uncle,’ he replied, not yet understanding the application of the
text.
‘You see, Jonathan,’ said his uncle, ‘Davidina was getting at you.’
Being a True Believer’s interpretation, it was not open to discussion,
not for Jonathan at any rate. Uncle Phineas was a mighty hunter of
the Scriptures before the Lord: the true interpretation never escaped
him.
It was a curious and unexplained fact that Davidina was a great
favourite of Uncle Phineas, so far as one so entirely without affection
could be said to have favourites. Davidina was far from being a True
Believer, yet he trusted her; and he did not yet quite trust Jonathan.
But he saw well enough that Jonathan had in him the makings of a
prophet and of a preacher; if only he could trust him, he would help
him to go far. But the testing process took time.
So, day by day, Mr. Trimblerigg laboured to win his trust, and often,
after long hours of boredom in his uncle’s company, success seemed
near; for intellectually he was now growing fast, and to the cultivation
of an agile brain added the cultivation of a wily tongue, and even
where his future career did not depend upon it he loved to sustain an
argument.
But he never got the better of Uncle Phineas; for when Phineas
could not answer him, the Book did. He began to loathe the Book—
that particular copy of it, I mean—and to make faces at it behind his
uncle’s back. But a day came when he loved it like a brother.
At the right time for the forwarding of his plans, Mr. Trimblerigg
professed a desire for larger book-learning; he wanted to study
theology, and that not from one point of view alone. Ready to satisfy
him, up to a point, Uncle Phineas plied him with books containing the
true doctrine, some he would make him sit down and read aloud
upon the spot while he expounded them; others he let him take away
to study and return, questioning him closely thereafter to discover
how well he had read them. They were all good books—good in the
moral sense, that is to say—books written to inculcate the principles
of True Belief; but all, from the contemporary point of view utterly
useless, and all deadly dull.
One day Mr. Trimblerigg asked his uncle, ‘Where all the other books
were—the bad ones, which taught false doctrine.’
Why did he want to know? inquired Uncle Phineas.
‘I want to read them,’ said Jonathan greatly daring. ‘If one doesn’t
read them, how is one to know how to answer them? I want to read
them because they deceive people.’
‘Not True Believers,’ said his uncle.
‘No,’ replied Jonathan, ‘but people who might become True
Believers.’
‘They should read their Bibles. There you find the answer to
everything.’
‘Yes. So I did; I did it last night as I was going to bed: I opened it, just
as you do, Uncle, and there it was—written: the thing I was wanting
to know.’
‘What was it?’
‘It was this, Uncle: “Oh, that mine adversary had written a book.
Surely I would take it upon my shoulder and bind it as a crown unto
me.”’
‘That doesn’t say read it,’ objected his uncle.
‘No, but it means it. It means that if wicked books are written we’ve
got to do with them, we’ve not just got to let them alone.’
‘We’ll see,’ replied the other; ‘we’ll ask the Lord to show us.’ He got
the Book and opened it. ‘There, Jonathan, listen to this:
‘“What profiteth the graven image that the maker thereof hath graven
it; the molten image, the teacher of lies, that the maker of his work
trusteth therein to make dumb idols” ... God’s answered you,
Jonathan.’
‘But that’s about the man who wrote it,’ objected Jonathan. ‘He trusts
in his work, but I don’t; he’s not going to make a dumb idol of me.’
‘You’re running your head into danger, Jonathan. If you are not a
True Believer, the Book may be only a trap set for you by the Devil.
He can quote Scripture when it suits him, as well as any.’
‘But I prayed first,’ said Jonathan. ‘And I’m trying to become a True
Believer.’
‘When you’ve become a True Believer, we’ll talk about it,’ said his
uncle.
After that for a whole week his uncle saw no more of him. Then one
day, waking up from his afternoon nap, the old man found Jonathan
sitting and looking at him.
It was quite five minutes since Jonathan had crept in, and during that
time he had not been idle. He had gone to the Book, and arranged a
marker, and three and four times he had opened and without looking
had put his finger to the exact place; just a finger’s length from the
bottom on the right-hand side, it was easy to find. Then, sitting far
away from the Book, he had waited for his uncle to wake.
He did not allow the haze of sleep to disperse before he made his
announcement.
‘Uncle,’ he said, ‘I’ve become a True Believer. I’ve had a call: God
has shown me the way.’
‘How do you know you’re a True Believer?’ questioned the old man
cautiously.
‘I’ve His Word for it. Every time I open the Book it speaks to me—so
plain, that at first it frightened me. Then I felt a great joy and a light
filling me. And everything in the world is different to what it was.’
‘Aye,’ replied his uncle, ‘that sounds the real thing. What has He
called you to do?’
‘To go out and preach, Uncle. And He’s told me I’m to go to college.’
‘How has He told you that?’ inquired Phineas, sceptical again.
‘I asked Him to show me what I was to do, where I was to go; I
opened the Book and put my finger on the page; and there—college
was the very word!’
‘You tell me that you found the word “college” in the Bible?’ inquired
his uncle incredulously.
‘It was found for me,’ said Jonathan: ‘Hilkiah the priest, and Achbor,
and Shaphan, went unto Huldah the prophetess, the wife of Shallum;
and she dwelt in Jerusalem in the college; and they communed with
her.’

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