SENSATIONAL DUEL OF WORDS ENDS IN STRATON'S DEFEAT

Confronting the aimed and calculated thrusts of a logician, the Reverend John Roach Straton, D. D., salient fundamentalist and divine, went down to defeat at the hands of Professor R. C. Givler, Ph.D. '14, of the Department of Psychology at Tufts College, in a verbal duel staged last night in the Living Room of the Union. Before an enthusiastic, responsive audience which packed the room and listened motionless throughout three hours, the divine and the psychologist thrust and parried on the subject: "Resolved, That this house believes that the growing tendency toward Agnosticism and Atheism is undermining our social structure". Dr. Straton, upholding this question, received 157 of his listeners' votes; Professor Givler won those of 226.

"Agnosticism and Atheism are the denial of God", said Dr. Straton in his powerful, clear delivery, "and since America is founded on faith in God, they are anti-American. The Pilgrims drafted the charter of the new settlement with the Bible their only guide, and it was devotion to God Almighty that brought them to these shores and sustained them. America is unique in the history of the world in that it is founded on religion."

"Political philosophers have shown that no political or social movements have ever succeeded in the history of mankind that have not been based on religion", he continued.

"Not only have all our states been founded on a religious motive, but since the landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, every crisis in our country has been met with religion. Religion is indispensible, for it is the only possible safeguard for the continuance of our national order. There must be something above all to which all can appeal and from which all may receive equal judgment, and this alone can be religion."

With no reserve and in his characteristic frank manner, Dr. Straton decried Clarence Darrow, H. L. Mencken, Rupert Hughes, Bertrand Russell, and others as having aided in not only the tendency but in an institution with financial backing for undermining the social structure of the country.

Following Dr. Straton in the forensic struggle, Professor Givler pointed out that society is not a stable institution, but one that is ever changing, and contended there fore, that any change in the existing state of affairs might be condemned as undermining the social structure of the country. "It is our habits, circumstances; personal fixations acquired in childhood that motivate us in any particular crisis in this world," he said, "not religion or anything related to it."

Professor Givler held that criticism of religion was simply a characteristic of this generation to investigate and to get at the root of all things. "Every atheist should be made a saint by the church for the healthy criticism he has given it", he said. Closing his arguments with an ode to Harvard, he pointed out that the University is "agnostic", yet a "saint" and a "sage"