For the benefit of my creditors

Foreword

"The consciousness of this sonship dominated his life and" .... and there the pen falls from the weary fingers ! He asked me to finish the sentence. I do not know what he intended to say. But I do know that the same consciousness dominated his life. If ever Jesus had a brother and God a see^ ond son it was Hinckley Gilbert Mitchell. And in the light of that conscious relationship how deadly a thing is orthodoxy! How petty, how futile, a faith that can cabin and confine God in doctrines and denominational creeds!

Here is as modest and self -withholding a story as a man ever told of himself. It 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 Word of God, and in the minds of men. The geologist seeks some of the same truth in the rocks ; the astronomer in the stars. The Old Testament was Professor Hinckley Gilbert Mitchell's field; and laying aside tradition and the spirit of dogma it was as a scientist that he patiently, fearlessly, reverently sought for what his long and thorough preparation made him eminently able to find.

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Such was the timber of his mind. In his trial and 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 himself. His trial was long past and most of his life had been lived, before a page of this was penned. He came at it reluctantly: it might seem vindictive, might hurt his beloved church; it might seem selfish, egotistical and petty, and so undo the work of years of honest living. But neither himself nor his church was as important as the truth, and in his trial, truth had been tried and the only way of knowing truth had been condemned. So he sits down to this story of his life as to another Genesis, gratefully to account for the authorship of his being as a man and as a scholar, his preparation, his attitude, his methods, — and incidentally that his conclusions might be proved; for he never claimed to have the ultimate and the whole truth. We may or may not have the truth about Evolution, but we have a certain and a great truth in Darwin's mind and method. It was how Darwin tried to solve this problem, 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 Dr. Mitchell. I have forgotten all he taught me. But the way he taught me changed my outlook upon life. His

FOREWORD tii

attitude itself was truth, and flooded not only the whole mind, but one's whole being ^ with light. Many a time I have sat in his class room during the discussion of some highly difficult and dangerous (doctrinally) question, and said to myself, amid the drawn daggers of those who had murder in their hearts, "Right or wrong his findings, he is himself the way, the truth, and the life of scholarship."

He loved to teach. He loved to teach young preachers. He was not himself adapted to the pulpit. But he was the teacher born. The class room was his from the foundation of the world. Here he was preaching from many future pulpits. He saw his students at the ends of the earth speaking to the minds as well as to the hearts of men, revealing the intelligence no less than the love of God, and expounding a diviner Bible because it was so wholly human a Bible. In all of these future pulpits he heard his own voice speaking, his own simple sincere faith of the class room being given to men over the whole wide world.

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 I ever knew, doubting his every power and gift, and relying only on the truth to make him free, he would come into the class room viii FOREWORD

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. And how we loved him in return!

Then suddenly, after more than twenty years of this, he was expelled, — driven from this sacred class room and branded as unsound, unsafe, imfit!

No, not suddenly. It was only the verdict of his judges that came suddenly. No one nowadays could prepare his mind for a judgment hke 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, and though I prepared a brief paper in his defense for the Bishops, and 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

FOREWORD ix

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 God called him to a larger place, but never again in his old class room nor with his former 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 out to a stranger school, a shepherd without his sheep.

He forgave utterly; but he could not forget. He welcomed the new work at Tufts College. He found honor, and love, and fellowship there. 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 at Tufts, — 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 pol-

X FOREWORD

icies he had helped to shape, whose spirit he had helped to create, whose name and fame he had so largely helped to estabhsh, 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.

"Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem," he would cry as he passed by on the street, a stranger, and saw the students going in and out, "Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that stonest the prophets, . . . how oft would I have gathered thee under my wings as a hen gathereth her chickens, but ye would not."

This, however, was not the doing of the school. The Theological 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 loving 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 challenged him to a fair fight for his position; but to have been accused by three or four narrow-minded students, (one of whom recanted later and all of whom deserve oblivion), who had come with malice aforethought, whose very presence in the school

FOREWORD xi

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 lovingly 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 this autobiography. And I wonder, if among autobiographies, there is another that approaches this 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 an* other 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 ever seen ; and it is equal evidence of his Christian grace in a heart naturally stubborn and self-contained. No accusing word is here, nothing bitter and unchristian. But just the opposite: For the Benfit of my Creditors is a work of love. His very xii FOREWORD

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. His trial and condemnation struck straight at God. 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 children of the Ethiopians unto me, O children of Israel? Have not I brought up Israel out of the land of Egjrpt? and the Philistines from Caphtor, and the Syrians from Kir?

That God had led the Philistines and the Syrians, no less than the Israelites was the great lesson I was taught by Professor Mitchell. I recall the day we came upon that wonderful passage in Amos in our study of this favorite prophet; and how for the first time in my hfe the universality of truth dawned upon me out of that passage. I had been worshipping a tribal, denominational God, up

FOREWORD xiii

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 Professor Mitchell 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 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 xiv FOREWORD

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 exactly that, believed that the Church meant to make him a warning to all scholars and honest thinkers within its fold, that he set about this autobiography, which hastened his end and which he died writing.

"Rabbi," we students called him affectionately, and strangely enough he seemed to look the part. He was the thorough scholar. Careful, methodical by nature, he was German trained, and to all of this was added a profound reverence for the Book which was his life's study, and a deep sense of all 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

FOREWORD XV

after ton of the gross elements until she held in her hand the pulsing particle of radium, hardlylarger than the head of a pin, whose light illumines and almost bhnds 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 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 Professor Mitchell was never on the defensive. Let "the Forts of Folly fall," he was far over the frontier where there was 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, the light of truth, the truth of truth.

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Professor Mitchell was as simple as he was sincere. But simpHcity 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 stopped and called by name and quizzed by the great teacher. 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 here because it was such 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

FOREWORD xvii

out of the retaining wall in the driveway, big granite chunks of boulder they were in my meadow years ago. It was Professor Mitchell 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! 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, barehanded, try to hustle it onto the stone boat.

He had built stone waUs 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 from my driveway up Mullein Hill in Hingham.

Can the helpfulness and inspiration of such a teacher be measured? 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 hke 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, — xviii FOREWORD

which is one more terrible trouble ! But they sorely need human sympathy and wise counsel, and whether they got Hebrew or failed to get it, never a man came into Professor Mitchell's class room who did not also enter at the same moment into the great teacher's open heart and open home. Class room and heart and home belonged to every man who would enter. Professor Mitchell's capacity for patience in the class room was only equalled by the boundless sympathy and the simple hospitality of his nearby home. I do not believe he allowed himself to give me any more than he gave to all. Perhaps I cared more and took more than my share of what he offered to us all alike. From the day of the Maydole hammer to the day of his death, more than twenty-five years later, he never failed of interest in my personal affairs. When I was graduating from the Theological School, President Warren of the University sent for me. I thought I was to be disciplined for something. To my astonishment I was asked to join the teaching staff of the University, I have been on that staff ever since. It was Professor Mitchell who had suggested this to the President, utterly undreamed of by me.

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

FOREWORD xix

ejected from his chair as unfit to teach the preachers of the gospel of Christ?

The Mitchell home was childless, but not the Mitchell heart; and perhaps the perfect and beautiful devotion of husband and wife was actually deepened by their complete dependence, each on the other. Sturdy, independent thinkers, both of them, they often thought apart, but they always acted together in an ideal union. Never was a man more nobly devoted to a woman.

And throughout the years of his trial, and loss of place and income, she was his stay and comfort. Few men owe more to their wives than Professor Mitchell, for his whole life, every side of it found in her a stimulus, a high fine challenge, and an approval that is life's largest, best reward.

Not long after his own strange fate at the hands of his Church, there fell upon her a terrible stroke, with only years of hopeless invalidism to follow. She was never to be able to help herself again. For both of them now had come the supreme passage of life, but the deep things of the past had prepared them. Nothing in human life that I have seen was nobler, lovelier than the devotion of these two down all the years of suffering, — ^years of sympathy and mutual support.

A house of old books, of fine old things, of old world things particularly, there was always the

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peculiar quiet and yet the peculiar air of activity about the Mitchell home, so characteristic of the working scholar. It was an ideal home for us students to know, especially if we had wives, as many of us had, and I wonder if any other home in all the land was so much of an inspiration to so many young men and women as the Mitchell's home during those many student years?

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 were 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 that gave to his life a sweet reasonableness, completeness and reward.

There was no variableness nor shadow caused by turning in his unhurried life. For the loss of his professorship did not mean the end of Professor Mitchell's creative scholarship. He worked to the end and was preparing for the day's work when the end came. He knew our hearts, but we our-

FOREWORD xxi

selves 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 back in New York State 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. King's Chapel was offered for the funeral. The Chapel Choir volunteered to sing. The minister, the Reverend Dr. Brown, of the Chapel, would speak, so would Dean McCollester of the Tufts Theological School and Ex-President William E. Huntington of Boston University, his President during the trial and his life-long friend, — Methodist, Universalist, Unitarian, — in one mind, all differences forgotten in their single love for the honest scholar, the direct, the earnest, the sincere teacher, and the simple Christ-hke man, whose whole life had been a devotion to learning and to doing good.

Dallas Lore Sharp.

Contents

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Foreword by Dallas Lore Sharp v

Why Write? 1