18 / CHRONICLESnbeen at least “in embryo.” This is not to suggest that in thenmanner of preformationists a homunculus should be imaginedninside the membrane of the human sperm or that ansoul should be attributed to each and every pollen driftingnthrough the air, because human soul or mind clearlyncrowns the evolutionary process. What is suggested is thatnevoluhon or rather the vast spectacle of the gradahons of lifenwhich life has taken on over billions of years and through anmechanism which is at best most imperfectly understood,nbe recognized for what it truly is: a vision which is primarilynand ultimately metaphysical.nMan is capable of such vision precisely because hisnnature transcends what is merely physical. Taken in thatnperspective, the word evolution should give no fear to thenChrishan. After all, his chief perspective, main comfort,nand supreme concern ought to remain in the words: “Whatndoes profit a man if he gains the whole world but in thenprocess he loses his soul?”—and—“Don’t be afraid ofnthose who kill the body but are not able to kill thensoul”—and—“Be afraid only of the one who can relegatenboth body and soul to the gehenna.”nGehenna is merely the ultimate and eternal form ofnanarchy. This is to be kept in mind when humanistnDarwinists, including most college professors, are remindednby a fellow academic of the rank inconsistency of theirnreferences to moral norms as they recommend, say, thenJournalists and Other Anthropoidsn(continued from page 11)nand their parents. Young Americans started college asnmuscular Christians and soon found their faith witheringnon the vine. From their stories he concluded that evolutionnwas to blame, that it ineluctably unsettied the convictionsnof faithful people.nHe was wrong, of course. It wasn’t evolution per se butnevolutionists who caused the trouble: wise-guy professorsnout of love with philistine America, they used the latestnweapon against superstition and ignorance. The mark of ansecond-rate mind, liberal and conservative, is to politicizenevery question of literature, science, and philosophy, andneven then the universities were a haven for second-raters.n(In their defense, it should be pointed out that as secondratersnthey were at least several rungs higher on the laddernthan most current academics.)nRecent studies indicate that students continue to losentheir faith in college. Why? .Are atheists smarter thannChristians? The evidence of modern Christians like Eliot,nChesterton, Lewis, and Maclntyre (Alasdair, not Carl) doesnnot support such a view. Are all good scientists rigidnmaterialists? That would have to exclude, in this century,nAlbert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Sir John Ecclesn—queer birds indeed, if science led inexorably to annEpicurean world view. It is not even materialism that is thenproblem. Hume was, so far as one can tell, among the bestnof men. The cheerfulness he displayed in the painfulnmonths before his death appalled the superstitious Boswell.nI am not sure that the skeptical Hume, except perhaps bynhis example, ever corrupted anyone’s faith. Philosophy andnnnethical stance of civil disobedience in fighting against racialninequality. In coming to the aid of one such academicn(Prof. D. Kagan), Prof L. Pearce Williams of Cornell wrotenin a letter to the New York Times in December 1983 of thenvanishing of the moral world with the end of Victorianntimes. He also noted that our world today is a merenconsensual world, which, in view of the progressive breakdownnof consensus, is rapidly heading toward anarchy.nAs a historian of science. Prof Williams could hardly failnto think of Darwin’s work, which prominently figured in thenassault made on the traditional moral world in preciselynthose hmes. His failure to point that out and to recall thenrepeated disillusionment of eminent Darwinians with Darwinismnshows once more that the only thing man learnsnfrom history is that he never learns from history. But thosenwho do not wish to take seriously the lessons of history arenbound to help usher in historic disasters.nThey do so by cultivating horrendous somersaults in logicnwhereby all things, big and small, trivial and stupendous,nappear to evolve—or as the Romans of old would say,nunroll—from under wrappings that seem outright pleasant.nFor nothing pleases nowadays more than academic respectabilityneven if it is a cover-up for committing one bignmental robbery through uncounted petty thefts—all ofnwhich are made imperceptible by phrases hollow insidentheir learned exterior.nscience are by themselves too difficult, too serious toninterrupt the tranquil ignorance in which most of us dozenaway our waking hours.nHonest and hardworking scientists and scholars almostnnever present a problem to a healthy society, whether theynare Marxists, feminists, or atheists. Most academics andnwriters are, however, nothing of the kind. They are, most ofnthem, philosophes and sophists rather than philosophers,njournalists rather than scholars, propagandists rather thannscientists or theologians. Oh, journalists and pamphleteersnhave their uses. But wherever they are found—at ThenNation or The Spotlight, at Yale or at a Bible college, theynare not to be taken seriously.nBryan’s real opponent at Dayton was not so muchnClarence Darrow as H.L. Mencken. For all his failings,nBryan was an essentially honest man who had done his bestnto serve the American people. Mencken, for all his virtuesnas an essayist, scholar, and hale fellow (I grew up hearingnmy father tell stories about what a great guy he was to meet),nMencken had an ugly streak. If—to quote one of hisnfavorite writers—all poets are liars, then we shall have toncoin a new word for journalists, including Mencken. Whennthe great man from Baltimore arrived, he discovered he hadnbeen wrong about Dayton: it was actually a pleasant andnbustling littie town. But before long, he began to fill up thennewspapers with his venomous accounts of the local “primates”nand “anthropoids” who had made the mistake ofnbeing kind to him. Mencken deserved the lynching he justnbarely escaped. A man of Bryan’s character he couldnneither believe nor understand. While a nation mournednthe loss of a great moral leader, Mencken could only railnagainst him as “a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany withoutnsense or dignity.”n