The following article, reprinted in part from the New York Herald-Tribune, is one of a series which is appearing in that paper, surveying the religious situations in various American universities.

The writer, Elmer Davis, former editorial writer on the New York Times, has visited Williams and Yale, Times, has visited Williams and Yale, investigating the chapel plans in force at these institutions. The appended article is the result of a visit by Mr. Davis to the University, and describes the religious life of Harvard as Mr. Davis sees it.

The ambition of college students to be relieved from compulsion to go to chapel has lately been realized at Yale, and lately thwarted at Williams. But at Harvard the ambition, and the change of the chapel service from the compulsory to the voluntary system, is and old and all but forgotten story. Harvard has had voluntary chapel for forty years. And, naturally serves as the Awful Example.

Harvard Seems Heterogeneous

This is particularly true at. Yale, where, quite aside from the chapel question, the Harvard type is seen as a lawless creature subject to the uninhibited impulses of ungoverned individuals, a deplorable contrast to the integrated Yale man with his strong community feeling. Viewed from New Haven, Harvard College seems a heterogeneous, uncoordinated, fortuitous aggregation of individuals with no more unity than the population of an apartment house; whereas Yale College--not Yale University, which is a very different thing, likes to sing about itself as "amiciusque and areas." And in Yale, where a simple piety seems more common, at any rate in certain nucleate of religious sentiment, than in most colleges, the religion of Harvard tends to appear as mere materialistic skepticism.

Some Like it Hot, Some Cold

To set forth the corresponding Harvard view of Yale spirit and Yale religion would perhaps not conduce to the growth of Christian harmony and brotherly love. The appeal is to wholly different types of mind; but, as Mr. Ring Larder reminds us, some like them hot, some like them cold. Religion at Harvard and religion at Yale have this in common, that each is a natural growth of the habit of mind characteristic of the university. Yale's motto is "Light and Truth," Harvard's is "Truth" alone. Whether intentionally or not, the distinction appears to symbolize a difference in the Yale and Harvard attitudes.

But Harvard's seal also includes a subsidiary and all but illegible motto, "For Christ and the Church." The founders of Harvard never supposed that the interests of Christ, the Church, and Truth could for a moment come into conflict. When the first rudiments of settlement had been established in Massachusetts, says a document of 1612, the next concern was

"to advance learning and perpetuate it to posterity, dreading to leave an illiterate ministry to the churches when our present ministers shall lie in the dust."

Unitarians in Ascendancy

After nearly three hundred years Harvard still turns out ministers in large numbers, though they are hardly the sort of ministers, as a rule, that would appeal to the early, Puritan theocrats.

But about 1806--more than a century after Yale had been founded in protest against the earlier unorthodoxy of Harvard--what was to become the Unitarian movement got the upper hand in control of the university. In the struggles of religious liberalism against orthodoxy that enlivened the beginnings of the nineteenth century the "Christ at Eclesiee" part of the motto was removed. Harvard was out for the truth no matter where it led.

Nearly half a century later, in the administration of President Edward Everett, it was restored, and has been there ever since. It was once more possible to be for truth and the Church simultaneously. The Church had changed, in New England at any rate; and men's attitudes toward it, at Harvard, had changed accordingly. Since then the religious sentiments of Harvard has tended toward loyalty to the kind of church that is not afraid with any amazement, regardless of the discoveries that may be made in the search for truth.

From this same habit of mind comes the change in Harvard's attitude toward the chapel services. Originally the family prayers of the college community, natural enough in an age when all respectable persons held family prayers at home, the chapel was for nearly two centuries organized as a regular Congregational church, which all members of the faculty and student body attended as a matter of course.

After 1806 the Congregational church became rather a Unitarian church, but attendance was still obligatory until Charles W. Eliot became president of Harvard in 1869 and began the university's modern age. Dr. Eliot did not believe in attendance at religious services under compulsion; but here, as elsewhere, he had to labor against a powerful tradition, and it was not till the 250th anniversary of the university, in 1886, that chapel attendance was made voluntary.