Lord's Stronghold

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The great "Monkey Trial" spluttered out. Teacher John Thomas Scopes went away. So did all the newspapermen and Darrow the Infidel. In the Rodgers' little white cottage down on Market Street one sultry July Sunday, Bryan the Bibleman lay down and died; For a while it looked as if Dayton might become once more simply a sleepy Tennessee hill town. But F. Robinson, the town druggist, had an idea. He talked it over with some other townsmen—Joe Benson, Wallace Haggard, Euclid Waterhouse. They caught fire. On the hill where the Great Commoner had said he wanted a boys' preparatory school they would build not a school but a great University, to nurture true believers and make Dayton the Lord's one stronghold in the land. A year later, on Nov. 6, 1926, Tennessee's Governor Austin Peay and a great crowd of the faithful mounted the hill to shovel the first dirt and lay the cornerstone of Bryan Memorial University. In July 1930, re-named William Jennings Bryan University, it received a charter from the State of Tennessee, soon opened its doors to students. We believe in the bodily resurrection of all persons, judgment to come, the everlasting blessedness of the saved, and the everlasting punishment of the lost. Last week William Jennings Bryan University graduated its first class. There were eight members. The ceremony was performed on Bryan Hill under great oaks and a clear blue sky. Down in the valley a mile away the plainly-dressed audience of 200 could see tiny Dayton and the two-story, red-brick schoolhouse where John Thomas Scopes had taught. Abandoned by the high school for a new building, it had housed the University all four years. Nearby on the hill reared the weatherbeaten skeleton of what was to have been, until Depression came, the University's $1,000,000 Administration Building. Also close by stood the boys' frame dormitory, mostly student-built, and the girls' dormitory and dining hall, once a hospital. We believe in the personal return to this earth of Jesus Christ where He shall reign forever. On the speakers' platform sat Acting President Judson Rudd, 30, gaunt, stooped, solemn-eyed. Speaker of the day was the Rev. T. W. Callaway, Baptist of Chattanooga. From dying hands he received the manuscript of William Jennings Bryan's last oration, "The Trial of Jesus, or Was Jesus Mobbed?" and has since gone up & down the land delivering it. Now he exhorted the eight graduates to go forth and live as Bryan lived. "Have a whole Christ for your Saviour!" cried he. "Not the perfect man of Rabbi Wise. Not the mutilated Christ of Unitarianism. The whole Bible is our only staff, our only sustainer." We believe that all human beings are born with a sinful nature, and are in need of a Saviour for their reconciliation to God. Typical of the University's 75 students were the day's co-valedictorians. Logan Rector had worked his way through Bryan as a hotel nightclerk, saved enough to help his family build a new house on their stony farm in the hills near Evansville. Sybil Lusk is the eldest of a mountaineer's ten children. She comes from Miracle, Ky. All entering students must sign a pledge that while enrolled they will touch no alcoholic liquor, use no tobacco or snuff in the university buildings. We believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost, this Trinity being one God, eternally