CHAPTER V
THE MAN AND THE BOOK
CHAPTER V
THE MAN AND THE BOOK
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 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.