A SERMON.

Mr. Charles Mills Gayley, an extract from whose recent book, "Idols of Education," is quoted below, is apparently a pessimist concerning conditions at American colleges. Nevertheless the following extract should interest the thinking portion of the Harvard undergraduate body:

"How many nights a week does the student spend in pursuits non-academic; how great a proportion of his days? What with so-called "college activities," by which he must prove his allegiance to the University, and social functions by which he must recreate his jaded soul, no margin is left for the one and only college activity--which is study. Class meetings, business meetings, committee meetings, editorial meetings, football rallies, baseball rallies, pyjama rallies, vicarious athletics on the bleachers, garrulous athletics in dining room and parlor and on the porch, rehearsals of the glee club, rehearsals of the mandolin club and of the banjo, rehearsals for dramatics (a word to stand the hair on end), college dances and class banquets, fraternity dances and suppers, preparations for the dances and banquets, more committees for the preparations; a running up and down the campus for ephemeral items for ephemeral articles in ephemeral papers, a soliciting of advertisements, a running up and down for subscriptions to the dances and the dinners, and the papers and the clubs; a running up and down in college politics, making tickets, pulling wires, adjusting combinations, canvassing for votes . . . . talking rubbish unceasingly, thinking rubbish, revamping rubbish--rubbish about high jinks, rubbish about low, rubbish about rallies, rubbish about pseudo-civic honor, rubbish about girls; what margin of leisure is left for the one activity of the college, which is study?

"In Oxford and Cambridge, than which no universities have turned out finer, cleaner, more manly, more highly cultivated, and more practically trained scholars, statesmen, empire builders, or more generous enthusiasts for general athletics and clean sport--in Oxford and Cambridge the purpose is study, and the honors are paid to the scholar. There are no undergraduate newspapers, no class meetings, no college politics, no football rallies, no business managers, no claques for organized applause, no yell leaders, no dances, no social functions of the mass. Social intercourse during term between the sexes is strictly forbidden; and it is a matter of college loyalty to live up to the rule. Of non-academic activities there are but two--athletics and conversation. They are not a function but a recreation; nor are they limited to specialists whose reputation is professed. Young Oxonians, in general, lead a serene and undistracted, but rich and wholesome life. They cultivate athletics because each is an active devotee of some form of sport. And conversation--in junior commons, in the informal clubs, in study or in tutor's room--it is an education, a passion, an art."