Blue Grass Blade

HE LIKES THE BLADE

AND MY THREE BOOKS

McLeansboro, Ills., May 23, 1904.

Editor of the Blue Grass Blade:

Find enclosed $1 to renew subscription to Blade which I enjoy very much.

Have read all three of your books and like Behind the Bars best. Your Rational View is almost as good as Paine's Age of Reason, Dog Fennel a close second to Mark Twain's Innocence Abroad, and I am satisfied that Behind the Bars is the best book ever written inside of a penitentiary. I am now reading "The Story of Mary Mac Lane," and am delighted with it.

What has become of "poor little Mary Mac Lane of the sand and barrenness," the good liver of womankind, nineteen and all alone? I wonder if she is still "waiting the coming of the devil." She is a genius. I send clipping from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat for publication and comment, if you see fit. The piece is of special interest to me, partly from the fact, I suppose, that I have attended Ewing College of which Dr. Leavitt is president; and am personally acquainted with him and his unbounded zeal and splendid efforts in the upbuilding of this college, the main object of which is the education and Christianization of the rising generation and partly that it strikes me as a very unique and startling confession and concession for the president of a Missionary Baptist ministerial school to make viz: "That the present day college education does not have a tendency to make Christians of the young men and young women who attend the colleges." If mathematics is a non-Christian study; if so many men are made, if they don't find God in their studies; and, if such authors as Longfellow, Bryant, Arnold, Swinburne and a great many more that might be named; and the languages are so paganistic in their tendencies, I wonder why such devout Christians as Dr. Leavitt would allow them to be taught in their colleges. Why not have a regular old fashioned book burning, and strike out all these objectionable authors, languages and sciences, and have only the Bible taught in the colleges, with possibly a few like Pilgrim's Progress? We would get enough Christian zoology, Christian botany and Christian geology from Genesis: enough Christian astronomy from "He made the stars also," and from Gen. Josh. and Christian mathematics from a close study of the trinity-once one is three and three times one equals one. I believe the doctor is wise in his reasoning, but, in his practice extremely otherwise.

I remember how the doctor once tackled me about my being absent from chapel exercises which were becoming very dull to me. I tried to excuse myself with the plea that I couldn't attend chapel and do justice to my studies. He said it was all very well to be studious, but added: "Remember you have got a soul to save." (This is English as she is spoke.) I was at that time rather more inclined to be docile than hostile to their teaching so I decided to "cheerfully acquiesce, nor make my scanty pleasureless, and was from there on a regular attendant at chapel exercises, which consisted of an hour devoted to the worship of God according to the dictates of a missionary Baptist preacher's conscience-if, indeed, it were right to call it a conscience. I should have told the doctor that if there was a God in the soul saving business; and if I had a soul worth saving, he could save it, or let it go to hell and be damned. Generally such happy thoughts come to me too late to be said. But it looks as though there really is "an irrepressible conflict between religion and science," and that "they cannot peaceably occupy the same brain nor the same world."

It also shows that Dr. Leavitt hopelessly despairs of even attempting "to harmonize the astronomy and geology of a barbarous people with the science of the twentieth century." This country is dotted all over with school houses in every one of which, from the least to the greatest, are taught authors and sciences that are exactly contradictory to the scripture theory of the form, origin and age of the world, and the creation and final destination of man.

Great Christians have tried to palliate, apologize and harmonize, but Dr. Leavitt, be it said to his praise, is the first to have the courage to come out boldly and say that the sciences must down or that Christianity must suffer. Dr. Leavitt is right. He is consistent. Christianity must do away with the sciences, or the sciences will exterminate Christianity.

Yours fraternally,

WM. EMMETT JOHNSON.