"UNDERGRADUATE RELIGION"

The Rev. Albert Parker Fitch '00, D.D., preaching on "The Undergraduate's Religion" in Appleton Chapel yesterday, asserted that the real and spontaneous expression of religion in undergraduate life is found in free and generous human service.

Dr. Fitch said that youth is not primarily interested in the science of religion, that it does not want to be pious. It does want to be brave, clean, honest, and useful. It does, behind a deep and shy reserve, revere itself, its Maker, and its brethren. Here is a youth's conscious idea of his religion; that as boyhood ends, character must begin; that as manhood is consummated, capacity to serve must be its essential witness.

Continuing, he said that if service to one's fellow-man was to be the expression and fulfillment of one's religious nature, it must have behind it more than human sanction, there must be a spiritual as well as a human impulse. Not to serve is to die. Men grow dull, remote and old in the accumulation of riches or of knowledge which they do not share. That youth who is consecrated to this religion of service, giving himself to his God, as he finds God in his fellowmen, that youth is endowed with life's most durable and most precious compensation. He may not gain recognition or pleasures or riches or ease, but these are the accidental gifts of life and they are not essential to the fulfillment of his destiny. It is not enough that we should have had our tears and have known our laughter. We must give the benefit of our tears and laughter, our hard-won patience, our wisdon and insight, to any brother who walks the same hard path beside us, to any neighbor whose simple need constitutes a claim upon us.