The Prayer Petition.

The movement in Harvard College against compulsory attendance at morning prayers has again failed, the petition of the remonstrants having been rejected by the corporation. The petition asked simply that undergraduates over twenty-one years of age should be allowed to exercise their option in the matter, and that those under that age should be governed by the option of their parents. The decision is very curious when taken in connection with the yearly extension which is given to the elective system in the choice of studies. One would think that there was nothing in a young man's life on which he himself or his parents should be so competent to form an opinion as the time and place at which be should pray to Almighty God, and that there was no duty to which it was more absurd to drive him by law under defined penalties. And yet this is what the college authorities, who are steadily converting Harvard into a university in the large sense, insist on doing. The President and Fellows unluckily do not give their reasons, but the only creditable reasons must be either the belief that God is pleased with the presence in a chapel or church of unwilling, irritated, and irreverent worshippers, brought thither by the fear of temporal punishment, and does not mind the set against all religion which such a process is very apt to give young men; or the belief that a man is benefited by being present in any place in which prayers are being offered, no matter in what state of mind he may be, and no matter what agency has brought him there. But neither of these reasons is modern, or, if we may make a bull, rational.- Nation.