John Thomas Scopes Quotes

...I say, that Power must never be trusted without a check.

I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair. [Explaining his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial.]

We like to keep separate the evils of our national past from the sacredness of our ideals. That separation allows us to maintain a pristine idea of America despite all of the ugly things we have done. Americans can celebrate the founding fathers even when we hear John Adams declare to King George, “We will not be your negroes” or learn that Thomas Jefferson wasn’t so consistent in his defense of freedom. We keep treating America like we have a great blueprint and we’ve just strayed from it. But the fact is that we’ve built the country true. Black folk were never meant to be full-fledged participants in this society. The ideas of freedom and equality, of liberty and citizenship did not apply to us, precisely because we were black. Hell, the ability to vote for the majority of black people wasn’t guaranteed until 1965. The value gap limited explicitly the scope and range of democratic life in this country. So when folks claim that American democracy stands apart from white supremacy, they are either lying or they have simply stuck their head in the sand.

The little town of Dayton - not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened - was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don't realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn't overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn't so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.

While we waited on a bench outside the motel office, I bought a copy of the Nashville Tennessean out of a metal box, just to see what was happening in the world. The principal story indicated that the state legislature, in one of those moments of enlightenment with which the southern states often strive to distinguish themselves, was in the process of passing a law forbidding schools from teaching evolution. Instead they were to be required to instruct that the earth was created by God, in seven days, sometime, oh, before the turn of the century. The article reminded us that this was not a new issue in Tennessee. The little town of Dayton—not far from where Katz and I now sat, as it happened—was the scene of the famous Scopes trial in 1925, when the state prosecuted a schoolteacher named John Thomas Scopes for rashly promulgating Darwinian hogwash. As nearly everyone knows, Clarence Darrow, for the defense, roundly humiliated William Jennings Bryan, for the prosecution, but what most people don’t realize is that Darrow lost the case. Scopes was convicted, and the law wasn’t overturned in Tennessee until 1967. And now the state was about to bring the law back, proving conclusively that the danger for Tennesseans isn’t so much that they may be descended from apes as overtaken by them.

But in the years before the council, in a typical American parish, that ancient liturgy was too often approached haphazardly, celebrated carelessly, treated as an obligation to be rushed through as quickly as possible. After the council, of course, the introduction of a new streamlined liturgy gave immeasurably more scope to the casual approach. In Why Catholics Can’t Sing, Thomas Day comments: We can be reasonably sure that the Last Supper did not begin with the words, “Good evening, apostles.” Intuition tells us that John the Baptist did not cry out in the wilderness, “Repent, sin no more, and havernice day.” Common sense tells us that there is something immensely wrong and contradictory about starting off a ritual with “Good Morning.” We might even say that the laity in the pews “short circuits” when greeted this way at Mass. The church building, the music, and the celebrant in flowing robes all seem to say, “This is a ritual,” an event out of the ordinary. Then, the “Good Morning” intrudes itself and indicates that this is really a business meeting and not a liturgy, after all. Today, after more than a full generation of liturgical experimentation, the integrity of the liturgy can be compromised by two opposite dangers: caring too little about the established rubrics or caring too much.

As John Murray has pointed out: When Paul uses the expression “the many,” he is not intending to delimit the denotation. The scope of “the many” must be the same as the “all men” of verses 12 and 18. He uses “the many” here, as in verse 19, for the purpose of contrasting more effectively “the one” and “the many,” singularity and plurality—it was the trespass of “the one” . . . but “the many” died as a result.75