POOR ELL

"Yale Abandons Daily Compulsory Chapel," reads a dispatch from New Haven. One's first impulse is to rush to congratulate the Yale News for bringing to a successful issue its long campaign against anachronistic restrictions of religious liberty. Has a new era of liberalism at last dawned at Yale?

The hope is short-lived. Further details of the dispatch shatter the illusion, Yale authorities have relinquished nothing of their right to require attendance at chapel services, although to many students they are bound to mean nothing or even less than nothing. Battell Chapel is too small to accommodate the entire assemblage of students. The upperclassmen, therefore, are to be divided and will take their religious instruction in two shifts on alternate days. This is all there is to Yale's apparent change of heart.

And this concession, slight as it is, is denied Freshmen. Yale evidently entertains suspicions of all young men who have not been inoculated against moral disaster by a year of her special brand of religious nursing. "The incoming Freshmen," says the report, "will still be required to attend every day, their service coming at an earlier part of the morning."

Sooner or later college authorities, even at Yale, will come to realize that the attempt to make nobility of character depend upon an antiquated theory of the universe which no educated man believes, is fraught with very serious consequences. When a young student's awakened intellect rejects the metaphysics of his teaching, what then is to save him from throwing aside, as also without justification, his ideas of duty and morality which he was told were inseparable from that metaphysics?

Time end truth broke down the Sanhedrin and the Spanish Inquisition. Yale students must be patient.