The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

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 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 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! 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 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 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!