THE STUDENT AND RELIGION

The questionnaire of the Student Federation, in so far as it deals with compulsory chapel, meets a well-defined opinion at Harvard and the specific question requires little comment, except to note protest against compulsory chapel, is far from universal.

But the third question addressed to college presidents evoked answers of moment. It concerns the change of student religious interest since 1900. All the educators who did not deny that change had occurred, tried to explain the change they discerned, in optimistic terms. Some said that ritual devotion had given way to social service; others that the critical faculty in students had made them less doctrinaire: still others saw improvement on general and diverse grounds.

It may be that in their hope, college presidents are too prone to reach their goals in imagination. But it might also be said that, discouraged with failures they would underestimate the religious attitudes of their students. One may safely take their can did optimism as a taken both that irreligious conduct in students does not indicate immoral propensities and that the attitude of the average college president is rather more sympathetic than not.

There are, no doubt, further conclusions to be drawn from the answers to the questionnaire, but many of them rank-among the sentiments that have not yet crystallized. It is for the country-wide college public to make all it can of the publicity which reveals it coping with similar problems and cooperating more through contagion than contact.