Defense of the Faith

To the Editors of the CRIMSON:

Here in the world of Law School, it is easy to forget that the shopworn cliches of discredited humanism are still being bandied about such places as Eliot House. Thus, that anything so unimportant, so innocuous, so inefficacious for good or evil as the appointment of a University Chaplain should occasion the anonymous letter that appeared in your issue of May 7 came as quite a surprise to me. We have heard all this before, and rather better put, but as your correspondent seems to think his views so startling that he dares not subscribe his name to them, perhaps it would be a work of charity to afford him a reply.

Basic in orthodox Christianity is the belief that the individual left to his own devices is subject to kinds of behavor harmful to others, and inconsistent with his own true Happiness, as well in this life as in the life to come. The strive to overcome these vices and to replace them with their opposite virtues the Christian finds both an inspiration and a challenge. From the beginning, Christians have banded together to encourage and assist one another in striving, and for the common conservation and use of the means God has placed at their disposal for carrying it on. Our young friend seems to object to an organization of this sort because it hampers the development of the individual, because it is an "escape," and because in unity there is strength, and strength cannot be destructive. If I understand him rightly, then (it may well be than I do not), he would have us believe that the human personality is so good that it must be meticulously developed, and at the same time so bad that if allowed to combine with its fellows in a joint endeavor it will engulf us all in destruction too terrible to describe at any length.

Now, it has been my experience, and that of many others, that the indiscriminate development of the human personality is like watering a garden without ever weeding it, and brings on the most unfortunate results. It is from these results that I try to escape, and hope that I succeed. I am affiliated with an organization devoted to assisting in this salutary escapism and to preserving what remains of a civilization conducive to it. This organization boasts of more than human help, and if it commands a sufficient following to be humanly effective as well, I do not see why even such rugged individualists as our young friend at Eliot House should be disturbed.

Forgive me for seeking admission to your columns with a refutation of so dreary a tirade, but I feel I must from time to time express myself in defense of the Faith, however hackneyed the opposition. Robert E. Rodes, Jr. 2L