NORTHFIELD AND UNDERGRADUATE RELIGION.

The following quotation from the editorial column of the New York Evening Post is part of an article by President Fitch on "Religious Life at Harvard." "The first and universal characteristic of the Harvard undergraduate," he finds, "is a dread of seeming to appear better than he is." As a consequence, "he often appears worse than he is, lest you should think him to be what he is not. Prayer meetings repel him, and yet the daily morning service in Application Chapel is attended by one hundred of the fifteen hundred who could be expected to attend it. In what ordinary community of fifteen hundred could you support a daily service with such an attendance?"

It is probably due to this feeling which President Fitch points out, that there is the prevailing impression of Northfield as to its being wholly a religious meeting. Also, due to the same attitude towards religious matters which President Fitch mentions, Northfield is looked at askance by undergraduates. But this is a fallacious notion. President Fitch himself speaks of his own reversal of opinion upon first attending a Northfield Conference: "I then discovered that my impressions of the Conference had little foundation in fact. I found a joyous, delightfully vigorous and magnetic atmosphere. The men from the various colleges and schools were a selected group, frankly and earnestly religious, but normally and intelligently so. There was plenty of sport and recreation mingled with the meetings."

It is only necessary to consider how normal and sane is the daily program to be convinced that Northfield should not be avoided as being "too full of religion" or having an unattractive form of it. On the contrary, it is most attractive, and the most forceful indication of this is that many men who go for the first time in a skeptical frame of mind return the next year full of enthusiasm.