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And so this saturation in Hebrew prophecy, the chastisement of death, the sense of personal sin and shortcoming and the voices from nowhere, deepened, darkened and broadened his religious life. Yet with all this there went a peculiar common sense, a spirit of thrift and stickling for detail, a homely shrewd attention to all the little facts of daily existence. Sometimes this prosaic tinkering with things burdened, buried and submerged the spiritual life and striving. There was nothing left except the commonplace, unstable tanner, but ever as one is tempted thus to fix his place in the world, there wells up surging spiritual life out of great unfathomed depths—the intellectual longing to see, the moral wistfulness of the hesitating groping doer. This was the deeper, truer man, although it was not the whole man. “Certainly I never felt myself in the presence of a stronger religious influence than while in this man’s house,” said Frederick Douglass in 1847.