Reports Attendance of 100

With the change the organization of the college chapel as a church--will persistent at Yale and Williams--was given up. Appleton Chapel is not the home of an organization of believers, but a religious edifice to which any person religiously inclined may repair for devotions.

But how many avail themselves of this opportunity? It is in the consideration of the attendance at Appleton Chapel that the doubters in the value of the Harvard system have their turn. On the morning when this reporter visited the services, there were not more than a hundred in the-chapel, which will seat eight or nine hundred.

Whatever the Harvard chapel congregations' lack in quantity they make up in quality. This is not to say that they are necessarily composed of the fine flower of Harvard, though some of the best men do go rather often. (It must be remembered that an average daily attendance of seventy-five means that several hundred men attend on an average once or twice a week throughout the year). But those who go, go to worship; they do not go under constraint, as at Williams, nor because they think they ought to do their duty to God, to country, and to Yale, as at least some men are doing at New Haven.

You will not see newspapers or text books in the Harvard chapel, and you will not see them because there is no incentive; under the voluntary system, for anybody who wants to read to do his reading there. No man goes to chapel except from a spontaneous desire to participate in public devotion; the atmosphere is more reverent than in the average church. And the contrast in manner between the voluntary worshipers at Harvard and the constrained worshipers at Williams is simply appalling. Harvard men come into the chapel as into the house of God; Williams men, hurried, swarming, newspaper-landen, come into it as into a Bronx Park express.

Generally, speaking, the Harvard undergraduate attitude certainly tends more to caution, to coolness, to skepticism, than does that of most other colleges; but this, conceivably, is only an aspect of the general Harvard tendency to look things over a little more carefully than is apt to be done elsewhere. And while the undergraduate body may be less reconsiderable doubt whether the Harvard ligious than some others, it is open to alumni would not average up about as much religion per captia as would the graduates of most other large universities.

Philosophy a Popular Study

The fact that more than a quarter of the students in Harvard College are studying philosophy would seem to mean that very many Harvard men are deeply interested in the effort, be it formally religious or not, to find a meaning in life--or, putting it in a form perhaps more consonant with the Harvard spirit, to find out whether or not there are grounds for believing that there is a meaning in life.

So Harvard's alleged irreligious would seem to be mainly a matter of definition. Harvard long ago lived through the period of transition which Yale is painfully undergoing now. Yale men still lament the growth of Yale College into a university in which it is hard to preserve the old Yale unity and Yale spirit, but they have discovered no way to prevent it. Harvard met the difficulty by accepting it.

Tradition is Individualistic

Harvard will admit that the Yale spirit, that intense sentiment of community loyalty, has its merits (for Yale men); but Harvard's own tradition has in modern times been individualistic. Harvard has grown from a small college to a large college with perhaps the minimum of shock; there are more individuals than there used to be, but the individual is the unit.

So Harvard's religion is a religion of and for the individual, if he wants it. If it may seem to some outsiders that not many Harvard men want it, one must remember that Harvard, even in this blatant age, cherishes the rare virtue of understatement. At any rate, the choice is the business of the individual