PERH

AN OLD QUESTION.

ERHAPS in nothing is the traditional Yale spirit of conservatism more strikingly shown than in the attitude of the body of students toward compulsory chapel. While in many of the surrounding colleges it is met with open protest or submitted to with unwilling acquiescence, it is probably safe to say that here student sentiment is in favor of the present system, or at least not opposed to it. This is especially true in the earlier part of the course. For, the arguments in its favor are both obvious and weighty; they lie close to the surface and may be perceived by any one, as well by him who has never seen a college community as by the oldest member of it; while the reasons which sustain the other side, although early felt, do not present themselves clearly and with full force. until much later in the course, when thoughtful comparison has made fully apparent to us how great is the lack in our religious services.

It is of Sunday chapel, as supposedly analogous to the church attendance to which we are most of us accustomed when in our homes, that the writer would attempt to say

a word, which, if contributing nothing either very convincing or very new to this well-worn discussion, may at least have the merit of being the outcome of his own observation as an undergraduate in Battell Chapel for the last three years. And it would be unfair not to acknowledge at the outset the strength of the objections against the abolition of compulsory Sunday chapel. In the community at large it is usually held to be the part of staid and respectable persons everywhere to go to church with their families, so that habitual non-church goers become more or less objects of comment to their neighbors, and the constraint of public opinion supplements personal religious feeling. Here, in our individual carelessness of public opinion, it would be easy for one freed from home influence to form habits of indifference which would go with him in after life, were not the insensible power of family observance of the Sabbath replaced by compelled obedience to college rules. To leave the entire day at the complete disposal of each student would be to run the risk of seeing it in many cases used to put it mildly—unprofitably. The conditions of college life are such as would, without the restraint imposed from without, give greater freedom of individual action than almost any other surroundings. From the broadened standards and the strong good fellowship which are perhaps the two most prominent features of our new relations, comes a tolerance so liberal that it hesitates to give the right name to many things, and seeks to pass over as indulgently as possible what it cannot approve. But the processes of nature teach us that the fetters which bind subjective freedom should be gradually dissolved, not forcibly taken off. The average college undergraduate is no more to be suddenly given the most complete self-control and non-accountability to others than he is to be kept under the petty rules and close scrutiny of the school-room. The proper via media is again the object of our search. There is no empiric rule for us; we must decide each case by calculating the probable effects of either course and then striking a balance between good and bad.