Education: Dixit

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The verdict had been already delivered, but the trial of Teacher Scopes at Dayton, Tenn., did not close until last week, when Mr. Bryan's last speech— which he had intended to deliver in summing up, but which the defense had at the last moment canceled—was given to the public.

Mr. Bryan had told friends it was to be his greatest speech. It was his last great argument in defense of Modernism which meets halfway with Evolution.

No summary can do justice to Mr. Bryan's purple passages, such as: "Christ has made of death a narrow starlit strip between the companionship of yesterday and the reunion of tomorrow; Evolution strikes out the stars and deepens the gloom that enshrouds the tomb."

The following summary is designed to give the substance of his argument:

The Preamble. "Let me, in the first place, congratulate our cause that circumstances have committed the trial to a community like this and intrusted the decision to a jury made up largely of the yeomanry of the state."

The Law. The Tennessee anti-Evolution law does not forbid a teacher from worshipping as he prefers, nor from saying what he believes as an individual. It restricts him only as an employe paid by the staae and under instructions from the state.

"It need hardly be added that this law did not have its origin in bigotry. The majority is not trying to establish a religion or to teach it—it is trying to protect itself from the effort of an insolent minority to force irreligion upon the children under the guise of teaching Science."

The Facts. (Mr. Bryan rehearsed briefly the evidence presented to the jury, and the admission of the defense that Mr. Scopes had taught Evolution.) "These are the facts. . . . A verdict of guilty must follow."

Evolution and Christianity. "Christianity welcomes truth from whatever source it comes and is not afraid that any real truth from any source can interfere with the divine truth that comes by inspiration from God Himself. It is not scientific truth to which Christians object, for true Science is classified knowledge and nothing, therefore, can be scientific unless it is true.

"Evolution is not truth, it is merely an hypothesis—it is millions of guesses strung together."

"Darwin suggested two laws, sexual selection and natural selection. Sexual selection has been laughed out of the class room, and natural selection is being abandoned, and no new explanation is satisfactory even to scientists. Some of the more rash advocates of Evolution are wont to say that Evolution is as firmly established as the law of gravitation or the Copernician theory.

"The absurdity of such a claim is apparent when we remember that any one can prove the law of gravitation by throwing a weight into the air and that any one can prove the roundness of the earth by going around it, while no one can prove Evolution to be true in any way whatever."*

"Our first indictment against Evolution is that it disputes the truth of the Bible account of man's creation and shakes faith in the Bible as the word of God. This indictment we prove by comparing the processes described as evolutionary with the text of Genesis. . . .