Devoted to the Propagation and Defense of New Testament Christianity
VOLUME 6
April 21, 1955
NUMBER 49, PAGE 13b

An Open Letter To Roy Cogdill

Reuel Lemmons, Cleburne, Texas

Dear Roy, When I was a boy I owned a yellow hound dog. He often went hunting with me — or rather I went with him. He was a good dog. The only thing wrong with him was that he just went crazy when he got in the woods. He'd bark up every tree in the neighborhood, whether there was a squirrel in it or not. He just had to bark up some tree, and if he couldn't track a squirrel to one, he'd bark up it anyway. I couldn't ever trust that dog because most of the time he was barking up the wrong tree.

If by an "Institutional Orphans Home" you mean one with a board scattered all over the country, if you don't have as much trouble corralling your memory as you did your reasoning, you will remember that as a high school kid I was cutting my teeth on this issue you fellows are just now raising so much sand about while you were still hooking your thumbs under your bright red suspenders, pulling your tight legged britches high on your hips, setting your sailor straw square across your head, and spitting off the curb in Frederick, Oklahoma. It was twenty years after that that you even became aware that there was an issue.

I taught then that such a set-up could not be defended, and I haven't changed my mind about it since. Roy, you wasted a mighty lot of good space (three and a half pages of it) barking up the wrong tree.

Yours in the Faith, Reuel Lemmons