DEVOTION

Memorial Day, in a very earnest address, President Hibben of Princeton welcomed the students to the new $2,200,000 chapel whose doors he had just opened with a scriptural adjuration. "Beauty," he said to them, "is not an empty form. It has its content both of thought and feeling. It is an attribute of God himself . . . We believe that this chapel will fulfill another function than that of corporate worship, that it will prove to be for many a house of refuge in time of trouble and distress."

President Hibben spoke from a sixteenth century oak pulpit in a Gothic chapel of surpassing beauty. Designed by Ralph Adams Cram, it is the largest college building of its kind in the country. And if it is the monument of a dying faith, it is, in its very hugeness, pathetic. The faith of the elders that saw its erection is staunch and living, and it is evident that its intense beauty will cause a Sunday fervor among the undergraduates. But in the student mind of the day, that fervor, born of music, mysticism and impressiveness, is essentially pagan and orgiastic. It is not, of course, the conscious eating of a pot of honey of the grave. But still, if the free intellectual inquiry of the past two centuries has received at last a dusty answer, its late linking with Romanistic and esthetic mysticism should shed no very tasteful fruit. Since the student rarely feels the great sorrows and trials of the bitter depths vaguely referred to as life, the support of the church can seldom rise above the low level of sustaining organ recitals before examinations. And since the crown of youth is its searching self-reliance in the matters of conduct and God, any relinquishment of that independence in emotional self-indulgence because of keen sentience of beauty, is genuine loss.