The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of LifeLewis, Sinclair
General
The Trail of the Hawk: A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life
Lewis, Sinclair
City and town life -- Fiction; Minnesota -- Fiction
"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:
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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