THE SNAKE IN THE GRASS

Canute has tried again to halt the sea. And perhaps Iowa is far enough away from it to enable him to do so. The Canute in question is Dr. T.T. Shields, Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Des Moines University, who has fired his entire faculty for modernistic views. This is the second purging of sin from the Baptist institution, from which all evolutionists and geologists were expelled two years ago. The students have responded with eggs, a protest older than Genesis.

Dr. Shields has a hard task ahead of him. He is far from the sea, but the waves dash overhead, and they carry the voices of Columbia professors and Helen Kane. A wave of the hand may stop the sea, but it will take a turn of the dial to keep sin outside Des Moines.

Perhaps, in time, his student body will follow the faculty to the foot of the tree of knowledge and to the exit from the garden of Eden, and leave Dr. Shields the snake and an apple core.