The Merry Persons

(Ed. Note--The Crimson does not necessarily endorse opinions expressed in printed communications. No attention will be paid to anonymous letters and only under special conditions, at the request of the writer will names be withheld.)

The Editor of the CRIMSON:

The shade of Voltaire, who once marvelled that priests could meet without laughing, must be greatly pleased by Mr. Wright's letter in Wednesday's CRIMSON: now even this last miracle has passed. But why should Mr. Wright resent the merriment of the clorgy at "this or that doctrine or sentiment dear to the Christian mind?" Surely everything has its humorous aspect, and if the theological structures of nineteen centuries can crumble at a smile, then the sooner we smile the better.

Nevertheless Mr. Wright's discontent with the superficial attitude towards theology which seems to prevail in the "Theological" School and at Harvard generally, is only too well justified. One would gather, from the theological lectures in History 57 that the religious formulations of our culture are based entirely on ignorance and an almost deliberate perversity. But to dwell on the intellectual absurdity of a theological doctrine is as irrelevant, to an understanding either of the doctrine itself or of religion in general, as ridicule of the linear distortions of El Greco or Diego Ribera would be to an understandings of art. These distortions must of course, be studied, and may be laughed at, but not at the expense of the deeper meaning. That there is any deeper meaning seems to have escaped certain local "theologians." Lynn F. White, 3Gr.