To-day the Prayer Petition postal cards will probably be sent to the students for signatures. The matter should be heeded by all, for the end to be gained is worth far more than the slight work of signing and mailing a card.

Among some of the students, and among many of the outside newspapers, there exists a grave mistake in regard to the aim of the petition. We do not ask that prayers be abolished, but merely that we no longer be compelled to attend them.

It is not needful to discuss the uselessness of making a certain class of students go to a service, which does not accord with their honest religious views. Leaving this idea out of the question, daily public prayers might do great good to many. Under right conditions such a service may raise our standard of thinking and living. It may be made to turn our thoughts, from the almost unavoidable sordidness around us, to the higher, and finer things of life. That the so-called daily prayers at Harvard fail in this purpose, is too true. They stimulate few or none toward better actions. The failure, however, is merely because they are not prayers. They are an attempt to unite the worship of God with a police regulation. Such a confusion of acts of devotion with affairs of ordinary college discipline must inevitably destroy in us all feelings of sentiment, and reverence. Under the present system we always have a lurking idea that we are worshipping only the Dean and the Faculty. Thus compulsion takes away the one element which can make prayers helpful. Instead of doing good to a certain number, they benefit no one. Therefore, in consideration of what prayers now actually are to all, and in consideration of what, by a change, they might be to some, we respectfully petition our governing bodies to make attendance voluntary.