Give me a garden and the wages of hoeing my row. And if not a garden, then a little house of hens, a coop of pigeons, a colony of bees--even in the city I should keep bees, if I had to keep them in the attic or on the roof. Not every one can have a garden, but every one can either plant a tree, or raise one pig, or keep a cow or goat, or feed a few hens, or raise a flock of pigeons, or do something that will bring him personally into contact with real things, and make it possible for him to help pay his way with real wealth, and in part, at least, to justify his existence, and his book. 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. 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 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.