Burner almost frightened me by his hunger and thirst after knowledge, for in him I looked upon the epic grandeur of a mind, long starved, completely awake. All the outstanding, amazing, bewildering intellectual problems of the Universe and God, had solutions which Burner, with a sense of his limitations, sought to master. I had seen students of books before, prize scholars, in Evangelical University, but I had never beheld the workings of an awakened, mature mind. Books and the teachings of the masters were merely the starting points, the paths of departure, for Burner. He sought his path to God and God’s mind by his own charts. He was his own authority in thought, an independent ship under full sail exploring unmapped territory. He would sit in his Morris chair, in a secluded corner of his room, with his bony fingers propping up his gaunt chin, and with blazing eyes try to think out, in his own words, from a synthesis of his own observations, why God permitted evil. One night he rushed into my room with almost fanatical eagerness and compelled me to listen while, from a newspaper item which told of a father who had given some of his blood to his sickly child, he gave an eloquent theory of the Divine Fatherhood, suggested by that analogy. All his studies, in language, science, and philosophy were focussed upon his thought of God. They were not merely a discipline, or parts of a necessary curriculum, but the means to an end, the roads over which he went to a completer knowledge of his faith. The most unrelated and even trivial items of truth aroused his mind to action and set him at work on the most intricate and abstruse doctrines. He was critical down to the fine points of sharpening a pencil: he was intolerant of those who got their conclusions from text books. “I’m doing my own thinking,” was his favorite sentence, “basing it on careful reading and minute information and nearly always I find that I get conclusions, after hard thought, that I might have secured, second-hand, from books. But oh, Priddy, what a treat it is to be in the Seminary, filling in the mind after it has been starved all these years!” “It must be a tremendous inspiration to you, Burner,” I said, “you seem to enjoy it so!” “Enjoy it!” he gasped. “I revel in it! Just think how blank my mind was when I came here! I thought they wouldn’t take me. I had never been to college, and had little preparation. When they did take me and give me my chance, I resolved to make up for lost time, Priddy. Other seminaries would have refused me, and I should never have gone into the ministry. Of course it is the biggest inspiration that has ever come to me. It is my first real chance!”