Voluntary Attendance Begets Genuine Worship, Says Davis in Chapel Survey

The following article, reprinted in part from the New York Herald-Tribune, is one of a series which is appearing in that paper, surveying the religious situations in various American universities.

The writer, Elmer Davis, former editorial writer on the New York Times, has visited Williams and Yale, Times, has visited Williams and Yale, investigating the chapel plans in force at these institutions. The appended article is the result of a visit by Mr. Davis to the University, and describes the religious life of Harvard as Mr. Davis sees it.

The ambition of college students to be relieved from compulsion to go to chapel has lately been realized at Yale, and lately thwarted at Williams. But at Harvard the ambition, and the change of the chapel service from the compulsory to the voluntary system, is and old and all but forgotten story. Harvard has had voluntary chapel for forty years. And, naturally serves as the Awful Example.

Harvard Seems Heterogeneous

This is particularly true at. Yale, where, quite aside from the chapel question, the Harvard type is seen as a lawless creature subject to the uninhibited impulses of ungoverned individuals, a deplorable contrast to the integrated Yale man with his strong community feeling. Viewed from New Haven, Harvard College seems a heterogeneous, uncoordinated, fortuitous aggregation of individuals with no more unity than the population of an apartment house; whereas Yale College--not Yale University, which is a very different thing, likes to sing about itself as "amiciusque and areas." And in Yale, where a simple piety seems more common, at any rate in certain nucleate of religious sentiment, than in most colleges, the religion of Harvard tends to appear as mere materialistic skepticism.

Some Like it Hot, Some Cold

To set forth the corresponding Harvard view of Yale spirit and Yale religion would perhaps not conduce to the growth of Christian harmony and brotherly love. The appeal is to wholly different types of mind; but, as Mr. Ring Larder reminds us, some like them hot, some like them cold. Religion at Harvard and religion at Yale have this in common, that each is a natural growth of the habit of mind characteristic of the university. Yale's motto is "Light and Truth," Harvard's is "Truth" alone. Whether intentionally or not, the distinction appears to symbolize a difference in the Yale and Harvard attitudes.

But Harvard's seal also includes a subsidiary and all but illegible motto, "For Christ and the Church." The founders of Harvard never supposed that the interests of Christ, the Church, and Truth could for a moment come into conflict. When the first rudiments of settlement had been established in Massachusetts, says a document of 1612, the next concern was

"to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust."

Unitarians in Ascendancy

After nearly three hundred years Harvard still turns out ministers in large numbers, though they are hardly the sort of ministers, as a rule, that would appeal to the early, Puritan theocrats.

But about 1806--more than a century after Yale had been founded in protest against the earlier unorthodoxy of Harvard--what was to become the Unitarian movement got the upper hand in control of the university. In the struggles of religious liberalism against orthodoxy that enlivened the beginnings of the nineteenth century the "Christ at Eclesiee" part of the motto was removed. Harvard was out for the truth no matter where it led.

Nearly half a century later, in the administration of President Edward Everett, it was restored, and has been there ever since. It was once more possible to be for truth and the Church simultaneously. The Church had changed, in New England at any rate; and men's attitudes toward it, at Harvard, had changed accordingly. Since then the religious sentiments of Harvard has tended toward loyalty to the kind of church that is not afraid with any amazement, regardless of the discoveries that may be made in the search for truth.

From this same habit of mind comes the change in Harvard's attitude toward the chapel services. Originally the family prayers of the college community, natural enough in an age when all respectable persons held family prayers at home, the chapel was for nearly two centuries organized as a regular Congregational church, which all members of the faculty and student body attended as a matter of course.

After 1806 the Congregational church became rather a Unitarian church, but attendance was still obligatory until Charles W. Eliot became president of Harvard in 1869 and began the university's modern age. Dr. Eliot did not believe in attendance at religious services under compulsion; but here, as elsewhere, he had to labor against a powerful tradition, and it was not till the 250th anniversary of the university, in 1886, that chapel attendance was made voluntary.

Reports Attendance of 100

With the change the organization of the college chapel as a church--will persistent at Yale and Williams--was given up. Appleton Chapel is not the home of an organization of believers, but a religious edifice to which any person religiously inclined may repair for devotions.

But how many avail themselves of this opportunity? It is in the consideration of the attendance at Appleton Chapel that the doubters in the value of the Harvard system have their turn. On the morning when this reporter visited the services, there were not more than a hundred in the-chapel, which will seat eight or nine hundred.

Whatever the Harvard chapel congregations' lack in quantity they make up in quality. This is not to say that they are necessarily composed of the fine flower of Harvard, though some of the best men do go rather often. (It must be remembered that an average daily attendance of seventy-five means that several hundred men attend on an average once or twice a week throughout the year). But those who go, go to worship; they do not go under constraint, as at Williams, nor because they think they ought to do their duty to God, to country, and to Yale, as at least some men are doing at New Haven.

You will not see newspapers or text books in the Harvard chapel, and you will not see them because there is no incentive; under the voluntary system, for anybody who wants to read to do his reading there. No man goes to chapel except from a spontaneous desire to participate in public devotion; the atmosphere is more reverent than in the average church. And the contrast in manner between the voluntary worshipers at Harvard and the constrained worshipers at Williams is simply appalling. Harvard men come into the chapel as into the house of God; Williams men, hurried, swarming, newspaper-landen, come into it as into a Bronx Park express.

Generally, speaking, the Harvard undergraduate attitude certainly tends more to caution, to coolness, to skepticism, than does that of most other colleges; but this, conceivably, is only an aspect of the general Harvard tendency to look things over a little more carefully than is apt to be done elsewhere. And while the undergraduate body may be less reconsiderable doubt whether the Harvard ligious than some others, it is open to alumni would not average up about as much religion per captia as would the graduates of most other large universities.

Philosophy a Popular Study

The fact that more than a quarter of the students in Harvard College are studying philosophy would seem to mean that very many Harvard men are deeply interested in the effort, be it formally religious or not, to find a meaning in life--or, putting it in a form perhaps more consonant with the Harvard spirit, to find out whether or not there are grounds for believing that there is a meaning in life.

So Harvard's alleged irreligious would seem to be mainly a matter of definition. Harvard long ago lived through the period of transition which Yale is painfully undergoing now. Yale men still lament the growth of Yale College into a university in which it is hard to preserve the old Yale unity and Yale spirit, but they have discovered no way to prevent it. Harvard met the difficulty by accepting it.

Tradition is Individualistic

Harvard will admit that the Yale spirit, that intense sentiment of community loyalty, has its merits (for Yale men); but Harvard's own tradition has in modern times been individualistic. Harvard has grown from a small college to a large college with perhaps the minimum of shock; there are more individuals than there used to be, but the individual is the unit.

So Harvard's religion is a religion of and for the individual, if he wants it. If it may seem to some outsiders that not many Harvard men want it, one must remember that Harvard, even in this blatant age, cherishes the rare virtue of understatement. At any rate, the choice is the business of the individual