INSTRUMENT AND RECEPTACLE

Large bodies of the American clergy publish their recurrent opinion that the college men of today are an irreligious lot. College men are indifferent, they say, to the message of the Church; they are unappreciative of the value of religious thought. Not infrequently they scoff at these things, like the bad boys at Elisha; surely the bears will come and eat them up.

Among those clerics who do not subscribe to the fund of brimstone heaped upon undergraduates, Dr. Henry Emerson Fosdick is conspicuous. For years the advent of Dr. Fosdick has caused a bull movement in the attendance figures of Appleton Chapel. To take Harvard as a university type, no stronger refutation of the current charges against the student apathy toward religion could be found.

The undergraduate of today is not indifferent toward religion. He is profoundly interested in it, but he makes one demand of any creed. He asks that it work.

Student discussion of this topic is confined largely to private groups, and is concerned principally with the workability of religion. In the creeds presented by many preachers of the times the undergraduate finds a system, ready-made and not flexible enough to be adaptable to the work which he asks that it do. He does not care for such a system.

With a workable religion, the undergraduate will work, too. He wants to be an instrument, not a receptacle. Harvard's constant attentions to Dr. Fosdick is a tribute to one who would make an instrument of every man.