here on my desk lies a new book entitled, “for the benefit of my creditors,” the autobiography of hinckley gilbert mitchell, a scholar, a teacher in a school of theology—and now this book, a simple, sad book of human struggle and defeat, of spiritual and scientific adventure and triumph and romance.
the scholar is not the accepted stuff of literature. what of human interest can come out of a classroom? yet i have seen this scholar’s classroom when it was wilder than ten nights in a barroom crowded into one. i have seen some lively and human times in my own classroom; and i know that there is as real a chance, and as magical a chance, there as dana found on the high seas. there are frontiers for the scholar, especially in theology, as dangerous in their crossing as any to be met with by the overland pioneer.
dana escaped from the decorous and the conventional[134] life of social boston by way of the deep sea; mitchell escaped from the decorous and conventional dogma of his church by way of honest study; and his church tried him for heresy, and found him guilty, and would have burned him at the stake had that been the decorous and conventional manner of dealing with heretics at the moment. as it was, they only branded him, and cast him out as a thing unclean.
perhaps that is not a life human enough, and abundant enough, for a book. it is the simple story of a poor boy picking stones and building walls on his father’s farm in new york state; then, as director of the american school of oriental research in jerusalem, rebuilding “the wall of nehemiah”; then, as scholar and professor, re-creating “the world before abraham”; and finally, as the storm center of one of the bitterest theological controversies of recent years, dismissed, dishonored, betrayed for less than thirty pieces of silver, a silent, brokenhearted man. it is only another version of an old and very common story. prophets and pioneers are all alike; and their stories are much[135] alike, whether the pages turn westward, where new empires take their way, or eastward, back along the scholar’s crossed and tangled trails to a world before abraham.
as the manuscript of the book lay upon my table, i wondered if any publisher would feel the human pathos of the struggle, and the mighty meaning of it all for truth. who would publish it? but here it is, printed and bound, a book—“for the benefit of my creditors,” as if he were debtor to all, his enemies included, and owed them only love.
this is as modest and self-withholding a story as a man ever told of himself. there are all too few of such human stories. this one would never have been told had the author not hated intellectual cowardice as he hated moral cowardice, with a perfect hatred. he sought the truth—in the bible, and in his own mind. the geologist seeks some of the same truth in the rocks; the astronomer in the stars. the old testament was this scholar’s field. and, laying aside tradition and the spirit of dogma, he sought as a scientist seeks, patiently, fearlessly, reverently, for what his long and thorough[136] preparation made him eminently able to find.
this is the highest type of courage and daring. who finds truth finds trial and adventure. in his condemnation by the bishops of his church, he felt that truth had been assailed and the scientific method. he did not write this book to defend the truth, nor to defend himself; but to examine himself, as he would examine a difficult fragment of hebrew manuscript, and make himself easy for other men to read.
his trial was long past, and most of his life had been lived, before a page of his book was written. he came at it reluctantly: he might seem personal—petty or selfish or egotistical; or he might say something bitter and vindictive and do harm to the church. but neither himself nor his church must stand in the way of truth; and in his trial, truth had been tried, and the only way of knowing truth had been condemned. so he sits down to write this story of his life exactly as he sat down to write a commentary on the book of genesis—to account for his being as a man and a scholar, his preparation, his methods of study, his attitude, and approach.
[137]how much truth has he discovered? he makes no claims. darwin may or may not have the truth about evolution; but we have a certain and a great truth in darwin—in his mind and method. it was how darwin tried to solve the problem of life and its forms, rather than the solution, that has changed the thinking of the world.
for three years i was a student of hebrew and old testament exegesis under this scholar. i have forgotten all he taught me, and more. but the way he taught me has changed forever my outlook upon life. his attitude was truth, and it flooded not only the whole mind, but one’s whole being, with light. many a time i have sat in his classroom during the discussion of some highly difficult and dangerous question of doctrine, and said to myself, amid the drawn daggers of those who had come to trap him, “right or wrong his findings, he is himself truth, its life and way.”
life enough for a book? he could have written a book on teaching. for he loved to teach! he loved to teach young preachers. he could not preach; but he was the teacher born. the classroom[138] was his from the foundation of the world. here he was preaching truly—from a thousand future pulpits at the very ends of the earth. he saw his students scattered over the whole world preaching to the intelligences of men as well as to their hearts; revealing the wisdom as well as the love of god; and expounding a diviner bible because it was a wholly human bible. in all of these pulpits he heard himself speaking with tongues not his own, but the message was his own, the simple sincere faith of his classroom.
the thought of it thrilled him. it lifted him up. he dwelt in the presence of the opportunity as in the very presence of the most high. as humble a man as ever lived, doubting his every power and gift, and relying only on the truth to make him free, he would come into the classroom and take his chair on the six-inch platform, which raised him by so much above his students, as if that platform were the mount of transfiguration. his face would shine; his voice, his gestures, his attitude working with his careful words, made his whole being radiant with zeal for the truth and love for us, his students, so mysteriously given to his care.
[139]then suddenly, after more than twenty years of this, he was expelled—driven from this sacred classroom and branded as unsound, unsafe, unfit!
no, not suddenly. it was only the verdict of his judges that came suddenly. no one nowadays could prepare his mind for a judgment like that. for five or six of the years, during which the trouble-makers, under pretense of study, had elected his courses at the theological school, i had either been a student under him or his close and sympathetic friend. i knew, as he knew, that his enemies would stop at nothing in their bitter zeal; still, i remember vividly the utter shock and astonishment of the bishops’ decision. and i remember—for i cannot forget—its strange numbing effect upon him. it came over him slowly, else i think he might have died. it crept upon him like a dreadful palsy, leaving him dazed and dumb. he was too simple a man to realize it quickly, too entirely single in mind and heart to realize it wholly. it slowly crushed him to the earth. and never in all the after years was he whole again. his heart was broken. he rose up and taught, until the very hour of[140] his death, but never again in his old classroom nor with his old spirit. day after day he would pass by the theological school with its hundreds of eager students; he would see them gathering at the hour of his lecture; but another teacher (one whom he had trained) would come in and take his place, while he plodded down the street and on, a shepherd without his sheep.
meantime he was called to teach in another graduate school. he welcomed this new work. he found honor, and love, and fellowship among his new colleagues. they gave him freedom. they created a place for him that had not been before. he could teach what he wished and as he wished. it was enough for them to have him among them, and many a time he told me of how unworthy he felt of all this love and honor in his declining years, and how it had stayed and steadied him in his deep defeat. but they did not need him here—so he felt. it was more for the honor of scholarship than for the good he would do them. but he felt that they did need him at his own beloved school, whose policies he had helped to shape, whose spirit he had helped to create, whose name and fame he[141] had so largely helped to establish, and whose students, crowding in from the east and from the great west, he longed to take into his heart and his home, as for so many happy years he had been in the habit of doing.
“o jerusalem, jerusalem,” he would cry as he passed by on the street, a stranger, and saw the students going in and out, “o jerusalem, jerusalem, which killeth the prophets, ... how often would i have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!”
this, however, was not the doing of the school. faculty and students, with the exception of those few who came for the express purpose of accusing him, were loyal. the president of the university, his close friend, was loyal, and did all that lay in his power to prevent the iniquity of the trial and the decision. this only added to the tragedy. to have been tried by his peers and co-laborers, by those who knew him and the field of his labors, would have been perfectly fair, but to be accused by three or four narrow-minded students (one of whom recanted later and all of whom deserve oblivion), who had[142] come with malice aforethought, whose very presence in the school was a lie, to be accused by such as these, i say, and then tried by a board of judges, to whom he was largely a stranger, not one of whom probably was his equal as a scholar in the field involved—this made the shame to the school, to himself, and to truth, doubly deep and sore.
there remained one thing more for him to do; and as soon as he could do it kindly, as a christian, and dispassionately, as a scholar, without bias or prejudice or any personal ends except the ends of gratitude and truth, he set about his autobiography. and i wonder if, among autobiographies, there is another that approaches his for detachment, restraint, and self-negation; for absolute adherence to the facts for the sake of the truth involved, a truth not of self at all, but wholly of scholarship? this is more of a thesis than an autobiography—as if the author were writing of another “wall of nehemiah,” and no more involved in it, personally, than he was present in “the world before abraham”!
this is one of the most remarkable evidences of severe and scientific scholarship that i have[143] ever seen; and it is equal evidence of the inherent literary value of human life. no accusing word is here, nothing bitter and unchristian. but just the opposite: “for the benefit of my creditors” is a work of love. his very character had been assailed by his enemies, but this, while it hurt, could not harm him. he stood upon his conscious integrity, calm and silent. it was not the attack upon himself that concerned him. it was that truth had been attacked. it was an attempt to make the bible a denominational book; to confound truth with tradition and give it a doctrinal color or a denominational slant. the church may compel its theologians to do that if it has to, but its scholars, those who discover truth, it should leave free. god and truth are not denominational, nor protestant nor catholic nor hebrew. god is truth, and single or separate, god and truth belong to the fearless, the frank, and the pure—in science not more than in religion. for “are ye not as the children of the ethiopians unto me, o children of israel?... have not i brought up israel out of the land of egypt, and the philistines from caphtor, and the syrians from kir?”
[144]i recall the day we came upon that wonderful passage in amos in our study of this prophet; and how for the first time in my life the universality of truth dawned upon me out of that passage. i had had a tribal, denominational god, up to that time. i had been seeing different kinds of truth—like the different tribes of old in palestine—warring truths, each with its own territory, its own grip upon me, when suddenly, as the “rabbi” opened up this mighty saying of amos, i saw one god of us all, one truth for us all, and all of us searching, under god’s leading, for the truth. henceforth the philistines and the syrians and the children of israel were to be as the ethiopians to me, as they are to god—all of us led by him, and all of us free. no teacher ever taught me a diviner lesson than that.
it was not a body of truth that this great teacher was called to expound. it was the spirit of truth—the desire for truth, the search for truth, the nature of truth, that it is god—this was his high calling. and in condemning him, his church was confounding tradition and truth, blocking the road to truth, and threatening, in[145] this example of him, to punish the daring who discover and bring us forward into new realms of truth. in his trial and condemnation the church was saying: “study, but study to perpetuate the past; to preserve the old; to defend doctrine, and establish tradition. we have the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. no new light can possibly break forth from god’s word, or from any word. revelation is closed. and if you think you have new light, hide it, and if you discover new truth, do not publish it, do not teach it, for among the three hundred men in your school there are three who have closed their minds to light and truth, and have sworn by all the past to keep them closed; and it would jeopardize the church if you should pry those three minds open to the light and to the truth of to-day.”
these are not his words. there is a tang of bitterness in them. they are mine. yet it was partly because he believed that the church meant to make him a warning to all scholars and honest thinkers within its fold, that he set about his autobiography, which he died writing.
“rabbi,” we students called him affectionately,[146] and strangely enough he seemed to look the part. he was the thorough scholar. careful, methodical by nature, he was severely trained, and to all of this he added a profound reverence for the book which was his life’s study, and felt a deep sense of his responsibility as its teacher. had his life’s task been a haystack with one single needle of divine truth lost within it, he would have tirelessly taken it down, straw by straw, for the needle of truth, just as madame curie, aware of some mysterious power in the crude common bulk of slag, patiently eliminated pound after pound, ton after ton of the gross elements until she held in her hand the pulsing particle of radium, hardly larger than the head of a pin, whose light illumines and almost blinds the groping world. had professor mitchell not been a student of the bible, he might have been a student of chemistry, for his methods and his zeal were exactly those of the discoverer in any field, and it might have been his honor and glory, as it chanced to be madame curie’s, to give radium to the world.
instead of glory, his was condemnation and defeat. yet his very mind and method, applied[147] anywhere else, would have won him distinction and honor. there is no other mind or method, except the closed mind and the method of appeal to authority, as against the trial by experiment and fact. truth is truth whether in theology or in chemistry, and only the open mind, the free, the bold, the experimenting mind finds it. traditions have to be defended. truth is its own defense. the mind of the great scholar is never on the defensive. let “the forts of folly fall,” he is far over the frontier where there is no need for forts. so here in his life he writes not to defend himself, but to express himself, his gratitude; and to explain himself, his position, his purpose, his principles as to the way of truth.
here is a man who was as simple as he was sincere. but simplicity in a great spirit is the sign, the very expression of sincerity. he was interested in all human things. he could make wonderful coffee. he could build a stone wall with the best of masons, and how he used to tramp the woods with me for mushrooms!
i was a stranger in boston and had been in his classes for a week, perhaps, when i met him downtown. it was a very real pleasure to be[148] stopped and called by name and quizzed by the great rabbi. what was i looking for in boston? a hammer? “come along,” he said, turning short about, “there’s a good hardware store down this street. i’ll go with you and see that you get a maydole—a maydole now—they’re the only wear in hammers.” i got the maydole; that was twenty-six years ago; i have it yet. his was a little act. but i have drawn many a nail with that hammer. yea, i have built him a mansion with it.
i speak of that little thing because it was a characteristic act. the details of life tremendously interested him. he was entirely human and as interested in the human side of his students as he was in their intellectual and spiritual sides. from my study window here in hingham as i write, eight stone faces stare at me out of the retaining wall in the driveway,—big granite chunks of boulder they were in my meadow years ago. it was the rabbi who rigged the tackle and helped me put those stones here in the wall. he could fix a toggle, he could “cut” and “pize” and “wop” a stone with lever and chain so as to “move mountains.” “there![149] there!” he would say, “let the mare do the work; let the mare do the work,” when i would rush up at a quarter-ton chunk of solid granite and, bare-handed, try to hustle it on to the stone-boat.
he had built stone walls before—back on the hill farm in new york state, where he was born and had his boyhood. later he “restored” the wall of nehemiah about jerusalem, but not with any more zest than he helped me build with actual stones the retaining wall for my driveway up mullein hill in hingham. such is the man. would he be substance for a book?
theological students are as naturally full of trouble as rag-weeds are of pollen. they know enough to doubt; they are old enough to be married; they are poor; and they preach; and they would like to be pious; but the world and the flesh and the devil are against them. they are only as good as the average of mankind, but they have more than an average share of tribulations. they need hebrew—all of them—which is one more terrible trouble! but they sorely need human sympathy and wise counsel, and whether[150] they got hebrew or failed to get it, never a man came into the rabbi’s classroom who did not also enter at the same moment into his open heart and open home. classroom and heart and home belonged to every man who would enter. his capacity for patience in the classroom was only equaled by the boundless sympathy and the simple hospitality of his near-by home.
is it a wonder that the great body of his students were confounded and dismayed that he could be tried on some technical point or other and be ejected from his chair as unfit to teach those who were to preach the gospel?
after the trial the enforced leisure was immediately turned to new studies and larger literary plans. fresh fields were opened, too, for lecturing—in the university of chicago, in harvard university; and then soon came the invitation to join the staff of tufts theological school as a member of the faculty. life has its compensations and rewards; and if there was no cure for the mortal wound he had received at the hands of his brethren in his own church, this invitation to tufts, and the perfect fellowship there to the day he died, was a compensation and a satisfaction[151] that gave to his life a sweet reasonableness, completeness, and reward.
there was no variableness nor shadow caused by turning in his unhurried life. the loss of his chair did not mean the end of his creative scholarship. he worked to the last, and was preparing for the day’s work when death came. he knew our hearts, but we ourselves hardly knew them till he had gone. then the swift word reached us, and we were told that we should see him no more, that he was to be buried afar with no service of any kind for him here—here where he had labored so many years! it could not be. on every hand his old pupils appeared—methodist, universalist, unitarian—in one mind, all differences forgotten in their single love for the honest scholar, the direct, the earnest, the sincere teacher, the simple man, whose life had been devoted to learning and to doing good,—on every hand they app eared and gave him “the grammarian’s funeral.”
“thither our path lies; wind we up the heights!
wait ye the warning?
our low life was the level’s and the night’s:
he’s for the morning.
[152]
step to a tune, square chests, erect each head,
’ware the beholders!
this is our master, famous, calm, and dead,
borne on our shoulders.
“this, throws himself on god, and unperplexed
seeking shall find him.
so, with the throttling hands of death at strife,
ground he at grammar;
still, through the rattle, parts of speech were rife:
while he could stammer
he settled hoti’s business—let it be!—
properly based oun—
gave us the doctrine of the enclitic de,
dead from the waist down.
“here’s the top-peak; the multitude below
live, for they can, there:
this man decided not to live but know—
bury this man there?
here—here’s his place, where meteors shoot, clouds form,
lightnings are loosened,
stars come and go! let joy break with the storm,
peace let the dew send!
lofty designs must close in like effects:
loftily lying,
leave him—still loftier than the world suspects,
living and dying.”
