The following is The Baccalaureate address delivered yesterday afternoon in The Memorial Church by President Conant.

Gentlemen of the Class of 1937:

A layman's address on Baccalaureate Sunday is by custom designated a sormen. Perhaps I may be permitted, therefore, to sum up all I have to say in advance by quoting the famous text from St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans:

"And be not conformed to this world; but he ye transformed by the renewing of your mind."

With a layman's proverbial disregard for Biblical scholarship, I venture to place these words before you this afternoon torn from their context and ask you to read them with twentieth century eyes. If you will follow me in this I suggest you will have in hand an epitome of what you have been striving to attain during the last four years--an education.

"Be not conformed to this world; but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind." There have been few periods in the history of this republic, I am inclined to think, when it has been more difficult to follow the injunction,-- "be not conformed to this world." Of course, I am not referring to trivial matters. I am not discussing external modes of behavior--manners and social customs. Superficial non-conformists are often spiritual slaves to a special set of ritualistic dogmas. A considerable degree of uniformity among a group of people in regard to everyday behavior is not to be despised; on the contrary, the beneficial effects of such a constant environment on the life of an individual make for sanity and happiness. But being one of a harmonious group, though essential for the well balanced life of most of us, carries with it a constant threat, a constant insidious pressure to conform to the very bottom of our souls. How to resist this pressure without migration to a lonely mountain top is one of the main problems of the modern man who would be free.

Hits at Germany, Russia

It is not one world, one flesh and one devil which we must combat or flee. Today there are many--many at least in appearances; one devil at the bottom of them all, perhaps, if your theology inclines you so to state the case of man's ever-recurring ills. Each worlds has its own formulas, its own incantations, its own tests of conformity, its own methods of excommunication. In some lands the more independent spirits are physically coerced if the social forces are not sufficiently powerful to keep the waiverer in line. In these countries where the improved modern methods of appealing to the mob coupled with the actual use of force have been successful, an approach to homogeneity has been attained. Here is one world, and woe to the man who does not conform to it in thought as well as in action. I hardly need give illustrations. We are all too familiar with them, --the news from Russia and Germany almost daily illustrates the intellectual tyranny of a totalitarian state. There can be little room, indeed, for a nonconformist in a country where the Minister of Education declares: "The old idea of Science based on the belief in the supremacy of the abstract intellect is finished. The new Science is sharply differentiated from the conception that its honor lies in the everlasting nature of the search for truth." And now much room for spiritual freedom is there in a land where one of the scholars writes that "The teachings of Marx and Lenin have been incarnated in life. The socialist reconstruction of society is not a distant prospect but a definite plan of great work .... And as in all epochs in reconstructing social relationships we are reconstructing science."

Recalls War Propaganda

And when we turn our eyes from Europe and examine dispassionately our own country, what do we find? A serene and tolerant atmosphere? Quite the contrary--we find the contending worlds right here within the United States. Compare the two quotations from Germany and Russia which I have just read with the words of one of American's most gifted poets at a recent Phi Beta Kappa meeting:

"O scholars schooled upon the books:

Rise from you labor now? Enlist

For warfare in this fighting age

"No longer may your learning wear

The neutral truth's dispassionate peace: