President Wood stood silent. His glance drifted from row to row of students. They moved uneasily. Then his dry, precise voice declaimed:
"My friends, I have an unpleasant duty to perform this morning, but I have sought guidance in prayer, and I hope——"
Carl was agonizing: "He does know it's me! He'll ball me out and fire me publicly!... Sit tight, Ericson; hold y' nerve; think of good old Turk." Carl was not a hero. He was frightened. In a moment now all the eyes in the room would be unwinkingly focused on him. He hated this place of crowding, curious young people and drab text-hung walls. In the last row he noted the pew in which Professor Frazer sat (infrequently). He could fancy Frazer there, pale and stern. "I'm glad I spied on 'em. Might have been able to put Frazer wise to something definite if I could just have overheard 'em."
President Wood was mincing on:
"——and so, my friends, I hope that in devotion to the ideals of the Baptist Church we shall strive ever onward and upward in even our smallest daily concerns, per aspera ad astra, not in a spirit of materialism and modern unrest, but in a spirit of duty.
"I need not tell you that there has been a great deal of rumor about the so-called 'faculty dissensions.' But let me earnestly beseech you to give me your closest attention when I assure you that there have been no faculty dissensions. It is true that we have found certain teachings rather out of harmony with the ideals of Plato College. The Word of God in the Bible was good enough for our fathers who fought to defend this great land, and the Bible is still good enough for us, I guess—and I cannot find anything in the Bible about such doctrines as socialism and anarchism and evolution. Probably most of you have been fortunate enough to not have wasted any time on this theory called 'evolution.' If you don't know anything about it you have not lost anything. Absurd as it may seem, evolution says that we are all descended from monkeys! In spite of the fact that the Bible teaches us that we are the children of God. If you prefer to be the children of monkeys rather than of God, well, all I can say is, I don't! [Laughter.]
"But the old fellow Satan is always busy going to and fro even in colleges, and in the unrestrained, overgrown, secularized colleges of the East they have actually been teaching this doctrine openly for many years. Indeed, I am told that right at the University of Chicago, though it is a Baptist institution, they teach this same silly twaddle of evolution, and I cannot advise any of you to go there for graduate work. But these scientific fellows that are too wise for the Bible fall into the pits they themselves have digged, sooner or later, and they have been so smart in discovering new things about evolution that they have contradicted almost everything that Darwin, who was the high priest of this abominable cult, first taught, and they have turned the whole theory into a hodge-podge of contradictions from which even they themselves are now turning in disgust. Indeed, I am told that Darwin's own son has come out and admitted that there is nothing to this evolution. Well, we could have told him that all along, and told his father, and saved all their time, for now they are all coming right back to the Bible. We could have told them in the first place that the Word of God definitely explains the origin of man, and that anybody who tried to find out whether we were descended from monkeys was just about as wise as the man who tried to make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."
Carl was settled down in his pew, safe.
President Wood was in his stride. "All this evolutionary fad becomes ridiculous, of course, when a mind that is properly trained in clear thinking by the diligent perusal of the classics strips it of its pseudo-scientific rags and shows it straight out from the shoulder, in the fire of common sense and sound religion. And here is the point of my disquisition:
"On this selfsame evolution, this bombast of the self-pushing scientists, are founded all such un-Christian and un-American doctrines as socialism and anarchism and the lusts of feminism, with all their followers, such as Shaw and the fellow who tried to shoot Mr. Frick, and all the other atheists of the stripe that think so well of themselves that they are quite willing to overthrow the grand old institutions that our forefathers founded on the Constitution; and they want to set up instead—oh, they're quite willing to tell us how to run the government! They want to set up a state in which all of us who are honest enough to do a day's work shall support the lazy rascals who aren't. Yet they are very clever men. They can pull the wool over your eyes and persuade you—if you let them—that a universal willingness to let the other fellow do the work while you paint pictures of flowers and write novels about the abominations of Babylon is going to evolute a superior race! Well, when you think they are clever, this Shaw and this fellow Wells and all of them that copy Robert G. Ingersoll, just remember that the cleverest fellow of them all is the old Satan, and that he's been advocating just such lazy doctrines ever since he stirred up rebellion and discontent in the Garden of Eden!