THE RELIGION OF A COLLEGE STUDENT.

WE have heard many appeals to the college student concerning his duty to the Christian church. He should be, it is urged, a more constant attendant at its worship; he should commit himself more openly to its cause; he should guard himself against the infidelity and indecision which attack him with such strategy under the conditions of college life. May it not be of advantage, however, to consider this relation from the opposite point of view? May it not be instructive to inquire what the Christian church must provide in order to meet the needs of an educated young man, and what the college student demands that the church shall teach and illustrate? What has a young man the right to demand as a condition of his loyalty and devotion? What is there which the Christian church must learn concerning the character and ideals of a normal, educated, modern youth before it can hope to lead the heart of such a youth to an unconstrained obedience? What is the religion of a college student?

There are, of course, certain limitations to such an inquiry. We must assume on both sides open-mindedness, teachableness, seriousness, and good faith. We cannot take into account either a foolish student or a foolish church. There are, on the one hand, some youths of the college age whom no conceivable adaptation of religious teaching can hope to reach. They are self-absorbed, self-conscious, self-satisfied, selfconceited. There is little that the church can do for them but to pray that, as they grow older, they may grow more humble, and, therefore, more teachable. On the other hand, there are some methods of religious activity which cannot reasonably anticipate the coöperation of educated men. Here and there an imaginative young person may be won by emotional appeals or ecclesiastical picturesqueness; but the normal type of thoughtful youth demands of the church soberness, intellectual satisfaction, and verifiable claims. We must dismiss from consideration both the unreasoning youth and the unreasonable church. We set before ourselves, on the one hand, an alert, open-minded, well-trained youth, looking out with eager eyes into the mystery of the universe; and, on the other hand,

a thoughtful, candid, sensible church, resting its claim not on tradition or passion, but on its perception and maintenance of verifiable truth. How shall these two factors of modern life- the chief factors of its future stability the life of thoughtful youth and the truth of the Christian religion, come to know and help each other; and what are the traits of Christian teaching which must be unmistakably recognized before it can commend itself to the young student of the modern world?

To these questions it must be answered, that the religion of a college student is marked, first of all, by a passion for reality. No effort of the church is more mistaken, than the attempt to win the loyalty of intelligent young people by multiplying the accessories or incidentals of the religious life its ecclesiastical forms, its emotional ecstasies, its elaborateness of organization, its opportunities of sociability. The modern college student, while in many respects very immature, is extraordinarily alert in his discernment of anything which seems to him of the nature of indirectness or unreality. He has a passion for reality. The first demand he makes of his companions or his teachers is the demand for sincerity, straightforwardness, and simplicity. He is not likely to be won to the Christian life by any external persuasion, laboriously planned "to draw in young people," and to make religion seem companionable and pleasant. These incidental activities of the church have their unquestionable usefulness as expressions of Christian sentiment and service, but they are misapplied when converted into decoys. They are corollaries of religious experience, not preliminaries of it; they are what one wants to do when he is a Christian, but not what makes a thoughtful man believe in Christ. The modern young man sees these things just as they are. Indeed, he is inclined to be on his guard against their strategy. He will nibble at the bait, but he will not take the hook. He will consume the refreshments of the church, he will serve on its committees, he will enjoy its æsthetic effects, but he still withholds himself from the personal consecration which these were designed to induce. He will accept no substitute for reality. He wants the best. He is not old enough to be diffident or circuitous in his desires; he does not linger in the outer courts of truth; he marches straight into the Holy of Holies, and lifts the veil from the central mystery. Thus the church often fails of its mission to the student, because it imagines him to be frivolous and indifferent, when in reality he is tremendously in earnest and passionately sincere.

And suppose, on the other hand, that the church meets this candid creature just where he is, and, instead of offering him accessories and inci

dentals as adapted to his frivolous mind, presents to him, with unadorned and sober reasonableness, the realities of religion. What discovery is the church then likely to make? It may discover, to its own surprise, and often to the surprise of the youth himself, an unanticipated susceptibility in him to religious reality, and a singular freshness and vitality of religious experience. A great many people imagine that the years from seventeen to twenty-two are not likely to be years of natural piety. The world, it is urged, is just making its appeal to the flesh and to the mind with overmastering power, while the experience of life has not yet created for itself a stable religion. Fifteen years ago it was determined in Harvard University that religion should be no longer regarded as a part of academic discipline but should be offered to youth as a privilege and an opportunity. It was then argued by at least one learned person that the system was sure to fail because, by the very conditions of their growth, young men were unsusceptible to religion. They had outgrown, he urged, the religion of their childhood, and had not yet grown into the religion of their maturity; so that a plan which rested on faith in the inherent religiousness of young men was doomed to disappointment. If, however, the voluntary system of religion applied to university life has proved anything in these fifteen years, it has proved the essentially religious nature of the normal, educated young man of America. To offer religion not as an obligation of college life, but as its supreme privilege, was an act of faith in young men. It assumed that when religion was honestly and intelligently presented to the mind of youth it would receive a reverent and responsive recognition.

The issue of this undertaking has serious lessons for the Christian church. It disposes altogether of the meagre expectation with which the life of youth is frequently regarded. I have heard a preacher, addressing a college audience, announce that just as childhood was so assailed by infantile diseases and mishaps that it was surprising to see any child grow up, so youth was assailed by so many sins that it was surprising to see any young man grow up unstained. There is no rational basis for this enervating scepticism. The fact is that it is natural for a young man to be good, just as it is natural for a child to grow up. A much wiser word was spoken by one of my colleagues, who, having been asked to address an audience on the temptations of the college life, said that he should devote himself chiefly to its temptations to excellence. A college boy, that is to say, is not, as many suppose, a peculiarly misguided and essentially light-minded person. He is, on the contrary, set in conditions which tempt to excellence and is peculiarly responsive to

every sincere appeal to his higher life.

Behind the mask of light-mind

edness or self-assertion which he assumes, his interior life is wrestling with fundamental problems, as Jacob wrestled with the angel and would not let it go until it blessed him. "Your young men," said the prophet, with deep insight into the nature of youth, "shall see visions." They are our natural idealists. The shades of the prison-house of common life have not yet closed about their sense of the romantic, the heroic, the noble.

To this susceptibility of youth the church, if it is wise, must address its teaching. It must believe in a young man, even when he does not believe in himself. It must attempt no adaptation of truth to immaturity or indifference. It must assume that a young man, even though he disguises the fact by every subterfuge of modesty or mock defiance, is a creature of spiritual vision, and that his secret desire is to have that vision interpreted and prolonged. When Jesus met the young men whom he wanted for his disciples, his first relation with them was one of absolute, and apparently unjustified, confidence. He believed in them and in their spiritual responsiveness. He disclosed to them the secrets of their own hearts. He dismissed accessories and revealed realities. He did not cheapen religion or make small demands. He bade these men leave all and follow him. He took for granted that their nature called for the religion he had to offer, and he gave it to them without qualification or fear. The young men, for whom the accidental aspects of religion were thus stripped away and its heart laid bare, leaped to meet this revelation of reality. "We have found the Messiah," they told each other. They had been believed in even before they believed in themselves, and that which the new sense of reality disclosed to them as real, they at last in reality became.

Such is the first aspect of the religion of the student-its demand for reality. To reach the heart of an educated young man the message of the church must be unequivocal, uncomplicated, genuine, masculine, direct, real. This, however, is but a part of a second quality in the religion of educated youth. The teaching of the church to which such a mind will listen must be, still further, consistent with truth as discerned elsewhere. It must involve no partition of life between thinking and believing. It must be, that is to say, a rational religion. The religion of a college student is one expression of his rational life. To say this is not to say that religion must be stripped of its mystery or reduced to the level of a natural science in order to commend itself to educated youth. On the contrary, the tendencies of the higher education lead in precisely the opposite direction. They lead to the conviction that

all truth, whether approached by the way of science, philosophy, art, or religion, opens before a serious student into a world of mystery, a sense of the unattained, a spacious region of idealism, where one enters with reverence and awe. Instead of demanding that religion shall be reduced to the level of other knowledge, it will appear to such a student more reasonable to demand that all forms of knowledge shall be lifted into the realm of faith, mystery, and idealism. It is, however, quite another matter to discover in the teaching of religion any fundamental inconsistency with the spirit of research and the method of proof which the student elsewhere candidly accepts; and we may be sure that it is this sense of inconsistency which is the chief source of any reaction from religious influence now to be observed among educated young men.

Under the voluntary system of religion at Harvard University we have established a meeting-place, known as "The Preacher's Room," where the minister conducting morning prayers spends some hours each day in free and unconstrained intimacy with such students as may seek him. This room has witnessed many frank confessions of religious difficulty and denial, and as each member of our staff of preachers recalls his experiences at the university he testifies that the most fruitful hours of his service have been those of confidential conference in the privacy of The Preacher's Room. But if one were further called to describe those instances of religious bewilderment and helplessness which have seemed to him in his official duty most pathetic and most superfluous, he would not hesitate to admit that they were the by no means infrequent cases of young men who have been brought up in a conception of religion which becomes untenable under the conditions of university life. A restricted denominationalism, a backward-looking ecclesiasticism, an ignorant defiance of biblical criticism, and, no less emphatically, an intolerant and supercilious liberalism-these habits of mind become simply impossible when a young man finds himself thrown into a world of wide learning, religious liberty, and intellectual hospitality. Then ensues, for many a young mind, a pathetic and even tragic period of spiritual hesitation and reconstruction. The young man wanders through dry places, seeking rest and finding none; and it is quite impossible for his mind to say: "I will return unto my house from whence I came out." Meantime his loving parents and his anxious pastor observe with trembling his defection from the old ways, deplore the influence of the university upon religious faith, and pray for a restoration of belief which is as contrary to nature as the restoration of the oak to the acorn from which it grew.