The Eliot Chapel

To the Readers of the CRIMSON:

Lake the John Reed Club, religion, is being driven underground at Harvard. Forced to the damp sub-cellars of Eliot House, faith, like a frightened and desperate mongoose, flees the heights. Those who seek partial beauty in the secular ornaments of music are entitled to use the glorious Eliot Tower--granted a favored position by those who know not what they worship. Those who seek the more basic truth, shifty and apologetic, must beg a subterranean clothes-closet.

What was to have been a squash court is bequeathed to them only out of the ineptitude of Eliot House athletes. For shame, Eliot House! Even though I be the last in this House of Irreligion to raise my voice, I plead, I demand, that the music room of the tower be banished to the basement, that the seat of worship soar to take its place.

On the One Hand

On the one hand, as a music lover, I respect the genius of the men of harmony and symphony. But on the other hand, to speak more wisely and more widely, music is as nothing to religion.

St. Thomas put it, "Of the practical sciences, that one is nobler which is ordained to a more final end . . . But the purpose of sacred doctrine, in so far as it is practical, is eternal beatitude, to which as an ultimate end the ends of all practical sciences (music and art among them) are directed." Summa Theological, I:1:5.

On high with the cross! Nearer my God to Thee! An Eliot House Devout Believer Name withheld by request