The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

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 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 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 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 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?”

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 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, 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.