A shout from the rear of the room evidenced the approval of his younger hearers. The elders glowered at what they thought a trick to catch their attention. But trick or not, he did catch their attention, and he held it; he ceased to be the utterer of pompous platitudes; dropping his paper to show that he had done with it, he leaned across the pulpit and brought his long arms into action. He became the caustic iconoclast of the valley.
"We all agree that what I have been reading is nonsense," he said in a sharp-edged voice. "But I am here in the place of Valerian Harassan, and it seemed to me that I must give you what you were paying him for. I have been trying to say the kind of things he would have said. If you had been able to stand it a little longer, I should have told you that all the world's a stage and men and women but the players. I might even have attacked your risibles by anecdotes about my little boy at home and the southern colonel. Of course, I should have given you some inspiring thoughts, convinced you that life was a wonderful gift, something to be treasured and joyously lived, that work was a pleasure, that happiness came from accomplishing a set task. It's all here in this paper. I wrote it--and it was easy enough to do--because that is the kind of stuff you pay for. But it is one thing to write what you don't believe; quite another to speak it face to face. And yet if I am to speak the truth as I see it on such a simple little subject as life, I guess I am here on a fool's errand."
Doctor Todd and Judge Bundy seemed to be of the same mind, for they were whispering together; debating, I suspected, whether it were better to let him go on and try to talk fifty dollars' worth or to break abruptly into his discourse and end it. For so harsh a measure as the last they lacked courage, and the Professor hurled on, unconscious of the hostile stares with which they were stabbing him in the back.
Now, optimism was the foundation on which McGraw strove to build up character. Optimism permeated every part of our life there. From a narrow environment we looked out hopefully into broadening distances. Every year some confident youth told us from the college rostrum in rounded sentences that life was worth living; that sickness, poverty, disappointment, the countless evils which dog our footsteps, were nothing in the scale against the boon of opportunity. Every morning in chapel the doctor voiced our gratitude for the privilege of living and working. And now over heads that moved in such charged airs the Professor cast his pall of pessimism. He took his text from Solomon, and found that all was vanity. It mattered little whether or not what he said was true. He believed it to be true, and for the moment at least his incisive voice and long forefinger carried with them conviction. He railed at the old dictum that man was God's noblest work. The ordinary dog, he declared, was more pleasing to the eye than the ordinary man, and the life of the ordinary dog more to be envied than that of the ordinary man. Knowledge only lifted us above the animal to be more buffeted by a complexity of desires. The greatest thing in the world was self, and even the roots of our goodness burrowed down into the depths where the ego was considering its own comfort either in this world or the next. The proud man for whom the universe was made was nothing but a fragile thread of memories wrapped in soft tissue, packed away in a casket of bone, and made easily portable by a pair of levers called legs. After countless ages spent on earth seeking the true source of happiness men were still countless ages from agreement. One half sought by goodness to attain happiness in immortality; the other in Nirvana. One half found the shadow of happiness in inertia, in stupefaction, a mere satisfying of physical needs; the other in motion, joining in the mad procession which we call so boastfully Progress. By accident of birth we were of the progressive half and we paraded around and around, puffed up with pride of our little accomplishment, until we fell exhausted and another took our place.