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?