SOUTHERN LIGHTS

Evangelist Carlyle B. Hayes may never live in the category of the major saints. Neither does Savanarola, his predecessor, the famed religious man of Florence. Yet both have done their duty to a certain conception of right. Each has piled the vanities and conceits of his time upon the flames, and prayed.

Saturday under the influence of the evangelist's preachments the students of Southern Junior College in Ootewah, Tennessee, piled novels, pictures, lipsticks, roughe, and all the tracts on evolution found in the college library in a heap on the campus, and to them touched a match--symbol, supposedly, of faith. Thus from the campus of one American college went the idols of contemporary living.

Then, far from the glare of such chastity, Clarence Darrow must have fumed with wrath, for the heat of his summer oratory never burned the minds of his hearers as the words of Dr. Hayes burned their hearts. Reason has had but a single throne, and her reign was brief among them. Removed from the world and its foibles the students of Southern Junior College no longer fear the comment of Browning's priest with his--"Vanity, Vanity". They are free.

Yet, where the charred remnants of lip sticks and rouge preface a return to decency and honesty, there lie also the ashes of a certain amount of truth. When one sets out to burn from truth all vain coverings, one often scorches truth itself. So perhaps the students of this southern college are not quite free from vanity after all. For what is vanity but a kind of ignorance? A glorified ignorance.