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 And if you think you have new light, hide it, and if you discover new truth, do not publish it, do not teach it, for among the three hundred men in your school there are three who have closed their minds to light and truth, and have sworn by all the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.