Closing Statement
A very thoughtful Closing Statement.
History class took Laura and I to the Scopes Trial today. I learned a lot that I didn’t know before. There are a lot of myths out there on what really happened, but that’s a whole other blog…
The closing statement of William Jennings Bryan, died five days later after the Scopes trail. Perhaps the cruel tactics of Darrow, the ridicule of the press, and the realization that many people had fallen for evolution took it’s toll on him. Clarence Darrow resorted to emotionalism, ridicule, humiliation, and circular reasoning. Darrow called the people of Tennessee ignorant and backward so many times that many of them started professing a belief in evolution just to show they were really intelligent.
Here are parts of Bryan’s closing statement:
…Religion is not hostile to learning; Christianity has been the greatest patron learning has ever had. But Christians know that “the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” now just as it has been in the past, and they therefore oppose the teaching of guesses that encourage godlessness among the students…
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 a hypothesis – it is millions of guesses strung together. It had not been proven in the days of Darwin – he expressed astonishment that with two or three million species it had been impossible to trace any species to any other species – it had not been proven in the days of Huxley, and it has not been proven up to today…
There is no more reason to believe that man descended from some inferior animal than there is to believe that a stately mansion has descended from a small cottage. Resemblances are not proof – they simply put us on inquiry. As one fact, such as the absence of the accused from the scene of the murder, outweighs all the resemblances that a thousand witnesses could swear to, so the inability of science to trace any one of the millions of species to another species outweighs all the resemblances upon which evolutionists rely to establish man’s blood relationship with the brutes.
But while the wisest scientists cannot prove a pushing power, such as evolution is supposed to be, there is a lifting power that any child can understand. ‘The plant lifts the mineral up into a higher world, and the animal lifts the plant up into a world still higher. So, it has been reasoned by analogy, man rises, not by a power within him, but only when drawn upward by a higher power. There is a spiritual gravitation that draws all souls toward Heaven, just as surely as there is a physical force that draws all matter on the surface of the earth toward the earth’s center. Christ is our drawing power; he said. “I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me,” and His promise is being fulfilled daily all over the world.
