Le Rouge et Le Noir

In a grey frame house in back of Christ Church lives a man whom some people call Father, others call Reverend, and most call just Red. This hearty and cheerful man is the Reverend Frederick B. Kellogg minister to students at Christ Church and a Princeton man.

Red was at Princeton in 1928, just two years after the publication of The Great Gatsby. It was a time of great riches and revelry everywhere, but if any college was the spiritual stomach of the Twenties it was Fitzgerald's Princeton, where almost everyone would be drunk for a week at a time. As Red says, "People at that time were not very interested in religion." A proof of this is the fact that not one member of his class graduated with the intention of entering a seminary, although a number later found their way to the ranks of the ministry.

Most Princetonians in the Late Twenties headed for Wall Street or the Harvard Law School. Accordingly, Red appeared at the Law School in 1932, where in spite of high marks, he found that the law did not quite suit him. From glimpses of his father's New York office he had concluded that the law was too mechanical and abstract, and that he wanted to work in something more personal. Soon he switched to the Episocopal Theological Seminary.

Even after a year at ETS and two at Cambridge, Mr. Kellogg was not sure that he wanted to enter the ministry. He had always been deeply interested in people, however, and when he returned from Cambridge to find an opening as a religious advisor to students, he felt he had found his vocational home. This week he will have been at 24 Farewell Place for twenty years.

In this time Red has seen a great change in attitudes toward religion around the Square. In 1936, when he made his first call (to Wigglesworth), eyes peered furtively through a crack, and the door was hastily slammed. when Mr. Kellogg returned the next day, a number of people giggled at him. Later, he discovered that the Wigglesworth at him. Later, he discovered that the Wigglesworth man had been told that a sailor would appear at his door, dressed as a clergyman.

People are much more receptive now (the number of active college members has increased by 400 since 1936), but it's not just because Red looks less like a sailor. Part of the increasing response stems from Red's approach to students. Because students are perpetually in revolt against authority, he feels the most important thing is to avoid "harassing them" with morality and theological pedantry. "They think we're very moral," he says, "and are afraid we're going to prevent them from experimenting. But remember that Saint Augustine once said, "Lord, let me be pure, but not just yet."

He attempt to serve as a "religious irritant," attempting to stimulate people to think seriously, while a the same time seeing himself as a "protector of students against zealous parents." Often he gets letters from parents, urging him to "make" their progeny go to church. To these people, he sends a form letter, informing them that a person should only come to the church for his own internal reasons. Thus, he sees his greatest service in an attitude of watchful waiting, or, as he phrases it, a "positive negativism."

This emphasis on sympathy without pedantry seems particularly adapted to the Harvard community, in which freedom is the optimum. But, the rapid growth of the Bishop Rhinelander Foundation must, of course, also be ascribed to the recent revival of interest in religion everywhere. Mr. Kellogg sees the basis of this interst in a sudden post-war consciousness of an enduring conflict between East and West. He feels that the two world war served only as preparatory grounds-wells, each of which subsided when people returned to the comfort of their richesse. The Russian threat, however, seems destined to continue throughout our lifetimes, and, he says, has been the cause of real concern with serious questions of existence.

He finds his own resolution of the problem of existence in a belief that life does have some ultimate purpose, even though this purpose may be undefinable. As Mr. Kellogg explains, he is "not concerned with creeds so much as people," the essence of religion being kindness and sympathy.

Since his religion is based on a love of people, with his gregariousness he is well equipped for living his vocation all the time. And it permits him to contact students in situations not always available to more severe ministers. For instance, he has been known to frequent special functions of the Signet Society. Aside from the Signet and the daily round of ministerial activity, he finds a great deal of diversion in the traditional clerical sport of fishing. Lately, however, his favorite amusement has come to be the weekly ritual of rocking on the front porch of his Groton home, every Saturday afternoon.