Twenty-three out of every thousand Americans are college graduates. For every student enrolled in European universities our country has seven. So rapid is the march of enlightenment that, while the average American boy and girl as recently as 1900 had only one chance in thirty-three of entering college, they now have one chance in six. At the beginning of the century our colleges turned out about 15,000 B.A.’s a year. Now approximately 100,000 American bachelors of the arts and sciences are annually graduated, not counting the 25,000 products of professional schools. We are in the midst of the greatest educational era that any country in any age has ever enjoyed.
Inner progress has generally kept pace with this numerical increase. When a university is supported by an endowment of more than $100,000,000; when American affluence can draw to the faculties of our large schools Europe’s master minds and the pioneers in new intellectual conquests; when even the smaller colleges are able to select teaching staffs of specialized experts, we have, in spite of some patent weaknesses in cultural mass production, a system of higher education which has deservedly won world-wide recognition. The generous provisions for student aid by educational and governmental authorities, the commodious, sometimes palatial, buildings have attracted a vast army of students.
We are entitled to expect that the influence on marriage radiated by our American colleges should be positive and creative. The broadening of the mental horizon, the contacts with the experiences and expressions of rich minds, these notable blessings should be reflected in an enhanced appreciation of the sacred marriage vows.
In a general way this reasonable assumption seems to hold. Dr. Kreinheder, former president of Valparaiso University, asserts: “Four years at a college of high intellectual standard, yet pervaded by the spirit of Jesus Christ, will produce not only trained mentality and intellectual grasp but also a deepened spirituality and an emphasized consecration.^
In an investigation of 1,600 marriages among friends and relatives of students at Teachers' College (New York) 75 per cent of the educated married women reported their marriage as “unequivocally happy.” Dr. P. Popenoe, director of the Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles, declares that, while one out of six marriages in the United States ends in divorce, only one out of seventy-five college marriages terminates in this way. Much less enthusiastic, although more detailed, are the findings of Mary Lee in her Harper's Magazine article “College Graduates and Civilization": "Of twenty-five recent classes at Wellesley, for instance, there were 3,722 graduates, of whom 2,069 are married. Among these there have been thirty-eight divorces and four separations, or one divorce to forty-nine marriages performed. Figures for the United States showed one divorce for every six marriages performed in 1929."
But the case cannot be decided on the basis of faulty statistics. A twenty-five-year average is no accurate gage for present-day facts. A new generation has arisen, and there has been a war. In her delightfully intimate A Girl in the Eighties Miss Conant presents pictures of student life as it was lived in Wellesley during that ante-mauve decade. In one letter she writes:
“March 18, 1883
“My Dear Mother:
"What would you like me to write you about tonight in this one-sided conversation? I have just come from the class prayer-meeting. The Subject was 'Be careful for nothing.' Such a subject is well for anybody to think about, and it is surprising how much there is in the Bible about not worrying, fearing for the future. We have been studying Matt. 6, which is the plainest on the subject, especially the last four verses. The girls do worry so much here. Girls are apt to worry more than boys, they say. Miss Freeman was saying that there was enough nervous energy wasted in the college to give us all our degrees twice over. Speaking of her reminds me of the reception last night.... The girls did have such pretty dresses, Mama, it did make me want that dress I wrote you about more than ever. I am glad you think a cashmere would be pretty. I know just how I want it made, quite plain; and if it could be cut and fitted, I could make it with a little help without much trouble or expense. I do not see how I can get along without some such dress, and it seems to me, in fact I know from those who have been there, that the stores in Boston have their spring goods now, and I do not think in Greenfield they would have anything suitable so early. You see, if I do not have it now, I cannot until July; so all next term, when I want it, I would have to wear my black silk. That is handsome and will of course last me a long time, but for the summer I do so want a pretty light dress. Will you not send me the money so I can get it next week Monday when I go to Boston? You see, white is so pretty, and a white cashmere with embroidered trimming I do not think would be common-looking. Do you think a light-blue or light-pink would be prettier?" (Page 151 f.)
Contrast this letter with the activities in some of our girls' colleges today. Think of the sex questionnaire circulated at Smith College, the twenty divisions of which asked personal questions that aroused nation-wide protest.
The Church has no desire to frown on the contribution which a liberal education can make in preserving an outward veneer of courtesy and, particularly when prompted by Christianity, in promoting a wholesome regard for the welfare of others. Investigating twenty-three typical colleges and universities, R. H. Edwards, J. M. Artman, and Galen M. Fisher asked the seniors in these schools to report on the moral influences of college life. A substantial majority declared that college education had helped them to improve in fair play, in keeping pledges and paying bills, in their loyalty to home and parents, in their honesty in business deals, and in the use of time.
The same students also admitted that during the four undergraduate years their morality had slumped in some notable respects. Cataloguing this deterioration, 39 per cent of the seniors stated that their morals had declined during their college course because of the use of liquor; 37 per cent, because of the indulgence in disreputable conversation; 33 per cent, because of betting and gambling; 25 per cent, because of relations with the other sex.
Far more bitter charges have been laid at the doors of our modern universities, not by professional reformers but by leaders in our educational endeavors. President M. Leroy Burton of the University of Michigan, for example, read this riot act to his students at Ann Arbor: “You students are lazy; you loaf; you gamble; you spend week-ends in Detroit, and then you wonder why we do not want you here.... I am amazed at the things unmarried men and women will talk about. There are so many fine things in this world that we need not pander to the lower things of life to enjoy companionship between sexes. We have lately seen many things on the campus that would turn red with shame the face of any decent man or virtuous woman.”
Dr. Charles J. Smith, president of Roanoke College, Virginia, charges: “The world has never known the turning loose of such an army of hard-drinking, cigaret-puffing, licentious amazons as invade our campuses today."
President Frederick Bertrand Robinson shouted to his students at the College of the City of New York: "The conduct of some of you is worse than that of gutter-snipes."
Now, it has been objected, not that these and similar arraignments of college morals are magnified (for there are too many such charges raised by recognized educators), but that the collegians’ behavior is the normal conduct of all young people today. This wholesale attack cannot be sustained. Collegiate immorality is not merely a special brand; it is one of the by-products of the practical atheism that has usurped an unholy control in many college courses. Two decades have elapsed since Prof. James H. Leuba of Bryn Mawr presented data revealing that 86 per cent of American psychologists, 82 per cent of our biologists, 81 per cent of the sociologists, 68 per cent of the historians, and 60 per cent of the physicists denied the existence of God. Since his investigation we find no record of a campus revival or tidal conversion of college professors to Christianity. The dominant tone at some of our largest and wealthiest colleges is unmistakably antichristian; their philosophy of life every-day skepticism.
Some University men are apprehensive of this situation and alarmed over its consequences. Dr.Chauncey Brewster Tinker, professor of English literature at Yale, charges: "Universities fifty years ago were friendly to the Church. You could find there a central, guiding philosophy. Today the schools are full of strange people, who talk of applied psychology, educational methods, and human relations. These parvenus are hostile to Christianity or, at best, indifferent to its existence." (New York Herald-Tribune, May 21, 1932.) Dr. Herman Harrell Horne, professor of history and philosophy at New York University, admits: "Too often we have professors who stand on the side-lines and make wise-cracks about religion. What are we to expect from these institutions if they adopt an antagonistic and negative attitude toward religion?" (New York Herald-Tribune, May 24, 1932.) Dr. Charles W. Gilkey, a religious liberal, dean of the University of Chicago Chapel, attacking faculty encouragement of college infidelity, told the Baptist ministers of Chicago (March 14, 1933): "The enemies of religion are great today; for we have on every campus leaders of student thought who because of something in their own early training think it their special task to free students from religion. There are three of them at the University of Chicago." He then named two instructors, one in the department of philosophy and the other in the department of physiology. With this official recognition of the classroom opposition to Christianity, there is no further need to debate the imminence of this danger. It has been conceded, deplored, and attacked by university men.
When Al (Scarface) Capone was called "Public Enemy No. 1" to mark his preeminence in the fraternity of Chicago gangsters, the American mind was quick to exploit this catchy label. "Public Enemy No. 1" became the watchword of righteous civic indignation.
That the racketeer who forces helpless shop men to pay tribute to his piratical "protection" is an enemy of public welfare and that the gangster who mows down innocent pedestrians in his inter gang feuds is blasting at the very base of the American structure, is too apparent to require elaboration. But that the killers and their guerrilla warfare are the most destructive of all anti law-and-order forces; that the Thompson submachine gun and the shot-proof death-car roaring away from the scenes of carnage are the symbols of Americans greatest menace, is just another of those exaggerations with which the American public mind likes to be entertained.
The real "Public Enemy No. 1" is the notorious faith-wrecker who sits high in the academic councils, enjoys the plaudits of social acclaim as he hurls anathemas at Christianity, blasphemes God, and shakes manicured fingers at the Bible. The gangland chief, pale-livered coward that he ultimately is, can line up a half-dozen members of the opposing faction and riddle their bodies with a spray of lead, incidentally saving the state the expense of costly prosecution. But these Machiavellis who have dedicated themselves to the unholy task of poisoning the brain and the heart and the soul are guilty of crimes a hundred times more treacherous than gang massacres.
The consequence of this atheism, according to the plain statements of the Scriptures (Ps. 14:1), is corruption and abomination. And in no field of life is the breakdown following the denial of God more definite than in the issues of marriage and the family. Typical instances will illustrate these demoralizing tendencies of campus atheism.
About the middle of February, 1932, the public press of New York City called attention to a new compulsory course for Columbia University sophomores, a study of family relations. At the time it was announced interested students were given a forty-two-page syllabus written by Miss Ruth Reed in which the Christian attitude toward marriage, the home, and family relations was viciously attacked. Overriding the fundamental cleavage between right and wrong, the folder proposed: "The old invidious distinction between legitimate and illegitimate parenthood should be abolished. Every parent who assumes responsibility for the care and future of children should be considered a legitimate parent, and every parent who refuses such care should be considered an illegitimate parent, without regard to legal or religious formalities." Branding the restrictions imposed by marriage as undesirable, the brochure continued: "The family in its present form may be said to serve but inadequately the affectional needs of those who have entered into the relationship.” The prospectus also declared that "the married woman who dissipates her energies on petty social and club work and is a parasite on her husband is less worthy than the working bachelor girl who has unconventional relationships with men.” — A few weeks later Miss Reed told the Newman Club, a Roman Catholic students’ organization, "that she had experienced a complete revolution in her outlook on life; that she had become a devout Catholic and gratefully accepted the doctrines of this Church on marriage.” At the same-time emphatic protests were made to Dr. Butler, president of the university. These, we may feel sure, are responsible for the changes eliminating many of the objectionable features.
The open ridicule of marriage generally remains unchecked. Tendencies of college anthropology, as taught at Yale and other first-line schools, may be illustrated by the following report from the Chicago Tribune, dated January 7, 1931: “’Affairs without benefit of clergy,’ but based on love may be preferable to early marriages when couples are inexperienced and not economically independent, declared Dr. Edward Sapir, Sterling professor of anthropology at Yale and former University of Chicago anthropologist, in an address at the Old South Meeting House Forum in Boston today. He urged parents to seek to instill ‘emotional honesty’ rather than the notion of necessity and immediate marriage in the minds of their children and declared, ‘The scientist must consider the notion of sin as wholly irrelevant to the present problem.’ . . . “I am rather tolerant toward young men and women who live in what used to be called "a state of sin” if their relationship is based on love,’ he said.”
The citizens of the Badger State became so incensed over the utterances of certain University of Wisconsin professors that during the 1932 campaign the morals and teachings of the State university became an election issue. "One of the hard-working mothers,” writing in the name of the middle-class population of Wisconsin, penned this introduction to a wrathful commentary on Madison student ethics as encouraged by radical university teachers: "Parents of Wisconsin, to arms! Mothers of Wisconsin, you are invited to the University of Wisconsin for Mothers’ Week-end in May. It is none too soon. Bring your brooms and mop-pails. There is a great need of spring house-cleaning here. Bring several small pails. There are a few small so-called professors and instructors (especially in the English, dramatic, and psychology departments) whom you will wish to soak overnight in a strong solution. There are many places to be disinfected.” Then followed specific charges. In commenting on these, the Madison State Journal (May 1, 1932) declared: "What ‘A Mother’ charges, upon substantial evidence is that propaganda for immorality is going on unrepudiated in and about the university where the sons and daughters of taxpayers, separated from the influences of the home, are subject to the tendencies of the environment in which, in their formative years, they find themselves. We're standing right back of ‘A Mother.’ . . . We charge that atheists and agnostics are being paid with taxpayers’ money to teach in the university and that one of them in a magazine of nationwide circulation has just delivered himself of the thesis that there is no God. We charge that a woman student, within the month, has been permitted to flaunt the doctrine of free love in the Daily Cardinal without public rebuke. ... If somebody in the University of Wisconsin does not silence those who are ministering to this so-called social revolution, we predict a complete house-cleaning. The Christian fathers and mothers of Wisconsin, schooled in a morality which they believe to be the rock-bottom of any civilization’s stability, will not be idle in the matter. If the swing of the pendulum takes us toward destruction, they will stop the clock.”
As part of a program to shed light on questions of marriage, family, and the home a lecture was recently featured by the members of the Chapel Union, a non-sectarian religious group at the University at Chicago. Frankly did Mrs. Grace Loucke Elliott discuss the question of premarital relations between young people. When one of the students asked Mrs. Elliott what young people who planned to marry should do if they lack sufficient money, she is reported to have said, “The simplest thing to do is to go ahead and have relations as if married.” But she warned against it, stating, “Society does not yet grant you this right. It may some day. You must consider what others will think.”
In North Carolina a petition was handed to the governor on September 8, 1932, praying for the halt of the antireligious invasion at the State university and the North Carolina College of Women. Some of the best names in the State were signed to this protest, which declared: “We are registering a solemn protest against the character of some of the instruction that is being imparted to the young men and women attending those institutions — instruction so immoral and pagan in principle that it is destroying the faith and shattering the morals of our young people.... Our courts do not recognize as an excuse for youthful delinquency the professors’ claim that students should be privileged to choose the irrational, the immoral, the antisocial, the erroneous, the devils side of ethical questions as championed by satanic spokesmen.” The details of this petition, scoring the attitudes encouraged by certain teachers at these North Carolina schools, are often too pornographic to permit reprinting here.
These protests are not fanatical explosions. There are men teaching or lecturing at colleges whose utterances on questions of marriage and purity will, if carried through, utterly demolish the basic virtues upon which a moral and progressive America must rest.
Here is Robert Briffault, British psychologist, gynecologist, and anthropologist, who lectured at Columbia. In his book Sin and Sex he traces the Christian ideals of marriage largely to early pagan origins; he welcomes “a complete revolution of our archaic marriage and divorce laws”; he believes a new ethical conception will entirely dispose of the old idea of sin and morality.
Here is Prof. Howard M. Parshley of the zoology department, Smith College, who told the American Conference on Birth Control (January 17, 1934): "There is a wide-spread disposition on the part of intelligent, serious, and ethical persons to reject theoretically and in practice what I have called the moralistic view of sex and to regard sex expression as a psychological, romantic, and esthetic aspect of life rather than a peculiarly and specifically moral matter.”
Here is Harry Elmer Bames, professor of sociology at Smith College (divorced at Reno, only to be married there a few hours later), who insists that Christian morality must be scrapped, that instruction in the questions of marriage must be divorced from the Christian faith. American parents will not be encouraged by his picture of tomorrow’s college. Starting from the principle that, since students will transgress the moral code, “it is best that they should be safeguarded with the full equipment of knowledge and controlled by a sense of fitness and decency," he shows how the university of the next generation must pander to the desires of its students. He endorses promiscuous intimacies as “a desirable preliminary to the more intimate relations of married life" and quotes with undisguised approval the statements of an unnamed, oversexed University of Indiana student who asks for an all-university love parlor, a collegiate temple of Venus, furnished with famous (or infamous) paintings of love scenes and a full collection of amatory literature.
To come to the lowest levels of the new immorality as advocated by men in close contact with our American college life, we face the theories and teachings of Bertrand Russell and his now divorced wife, Dora Russell. While their influence is not restricted to our American colleges, it is in these intellectual arenas that they have found their largest following. For Russell is frequently heard on college forums, with a few notable universities as exceptions, where neither have been permitted to address the students. Enjoying the clamorous acclaim of many university men and women (a Southern college editor, for example, calls him "a speaker who is acknowledged as one of the foremost philosophers of our day"), Russell tells our young people repeatedly that they need not be guided by any ideals of personal purity. His antichristian teaching excuses lax sex relationships, condones unfaithfulness, and champions adultery.
Dora Russell repeated all these sentiments and asked: “What hinders us from establishing a social system in which young men and women who are out in the world earning may enter into open temporary sex partnership without harm to the work and legitimate ambitions of either?" She brazenly declared: "I believe in having two or three companionate marriages before one settles down. How else can one be sure? Complete inexperience is inadvisable both for men and women when they marry.” Unblushingly she confesses: "I would not insist on absolute faithfulness after marriage.... Marriage at present is submission to tyranny. It would not be wrong for a man to have six wives, provided he and they found mutual happiness, nor for a woman to have six husbands and a child by each if she and they found such life satisfactory." (New York Herald-Tribune, May 29, 1934.)
Russell, as other leaders in the disintegration of morals, has not hesitated to practice what he preaches. In an address on "China, (the Land of Promise and Peril" (in The King's Business, February, 1932), Dr. R. A. Torrey of the Bible Institute of Los Angeles, California, presents this sordid picture: “Two men, one from America and one from England, Professor Dewey of Columbia University and Bertrand Russell of England, have recently been employed by the Chinese Government to lecture in Pekin and the leading cities of China on educational topics. They have had an immense hearing, especially in Pekin. Professor Dewey is frankly unchristian, if not antichristian, and Bertrand Russell is an open and avowed advocate of free love, a pronounced and outspoken enemy of marriage and its obligations. Though a married man when he went to China, he was accompanied by, and lived with, another woman, who accompanied him to China. His wife secured a divorce from him while he was in China, and he continued living with the other woman, but did not marry her, and both he and she lectured in different parts of China in advocacy of free love. He is a brilliant man in many ways, but a grossly immoral man according to Christian standards of ethics. He had a great following in Pekin, especially among the student classes, and a great influence against Christianity and Christian ethics, and his most enthusiastic supporters were the returned students from America. Professor Dewey and his lawful wife traveled from city to city with this man Russell and his paramour and attended receptions where Russell and this woman attended and were introduced along with this disgusting couple."
As the climax of a career molded to his subversive theories came the divorce granted to Dora Russell because of her husband’s unfaithfulness. This divorce is the second in the marital and extramarital career of this titled exponent of libertinism. Although this divorce was granted without contest on the ground that he had been guilty of immoral conduct, it did not deter the advocate, of freedom in wedlock from marrying again three months later. His third bride was twenty-five years old.
The religious bankruptcy which follows this free and easy philosophy of life is the strongest evidence of its depravity. American higher education has loaded upon itself the iniquity of leading college men and women away from God, Christ, the Bible, and the Church. The experiences of Philip B. Wentworth (Atlantic Monthly, June, 1932, "What College Did to My Religion"), who went to Harvard as a prospective Presbyterian clergyman and left it as an atheist, has been repeated in too frequent instances. In Undergraduates, while 55 per cent of the men and 59 per cent of the women interrogated found that college education had made religion a larger force in their lives, others declared that they had lost faith.
Typical are these student confessions (o. c.): "I have completely abandoned all reverence and superstitious awe in my religious belief. I no longer regard preparation for the life hereafter as a dominant motive in life. I believe that religion may be an aid, though it is not a necessity, in living a life of service." "I do not weigh my acts as I did before. This is partly because I have changed my ideas about religion. I am now a Modernist. I do wrong, but it does not bother me as it did before." One third of those who answered the questionnaire confessed that, while at college, they had dropped their belief in the inspiration of the Scriptures. More than one fourth of the students admitted that the scientific courses were the chief obstacles to their believing. More than four fifths expressed their acceptance of an evolutionary hypothesis.
Other, earlier, investigations could be adduced to present even more startling figures. But no one who has lived on a typical American campus can be blind to the faith-wrecking propensities of infidel teachers. Periodically, of course, we are entertained by optimistic accounts which hail the increased interest of the modern liberal college students in the work of the Church; but a survey at Columbia University revealed that motion-pictures were the chief pastime of a representative group of 308 students who answered a series of questions on student conduct. The Church played a rather insignificant and secondary role; for the 150 who had attended the Cathedral of St. John the Divine had gone "in connection with academic work," while the new Riverside Church, with the attraction of Dr. Fosdick, was visited slightly more frequently because of its bowling-alleys and social activities.
With Christianity gone, moral safeguards begin to disappear. The impressionable freshman who hears his psychology teacher inveigh bitterly against the "superstition of religion" may be persuaded that conscience is only an illusion. Tempted to follow the primrose path across the border line of morality, he can always find excuse in the sex-saturated course on Freudianism. Biology can always be relied upon to furnish reason why primitive impulses should be obeyed. The philosophy of behaviorism will pleasantly help to dull the sense of marital responsibility; and since all modern science is empirical, they argue, why not experiment in the laboratory of life? Why not twang the harp strings of sensuality as a line from the siren song of Dora Russell recalls: "Animals we are, and animals we remain"?
These effects of the anti-Biblical, antisocial teachings may best be visualized in the statements of students themselves as they are printed in the college papers. After a visit of Bertrand Russell to the University of North Carolina the following appeal for revolt, contributed by a student, appeared in the Tar Heel Topics, the undergraduate vehicle: "Some people can't seem to realize that the days of purity, self-sacrifice, ideals, and all that bunk are gone forever. We are living in a modern world, a world of ‘get out of life what you can, and let the devil take the hindermost.’ Then, too, that phrase ‘doubtful pleasures'! There is no such thing as evil or wickedness — merely the standards of the times in which one happens to be living."
An unidentified junior co-ed at the University of Wisconsin wrote the Daily Cardinal (Madison) a letter scoring virginity and championing free love which cannot be reproduced here. Four hundred members of a recent senior class at Columbia gave answers to a questionnaire on marriage morals which a generation ago would have barred them from decent society.
In a completely unrestrained confession called "Chastity on the Campus" (American Mercury, June, 1938) an anonymous co-ed introduces her defense of free love with these words: "Every third magazine nowadays contains an article on the case for chastity. Since there is a case for chastity, it follows that there must be a case against chastity." And with the charge that "at least 75 per cent of college girls are not virgins," she proceeds to argue against purity and for premarital relations. In voicing the revolt against Christian morality contained in these statements: "To us the idea that the bride must be a virgin is another example of emotionalism"; "We do not have much respect for the marriage ceremony itself," she claims to be the voice of the American campus.
One of the most faithful mirrors of student life and the college attitude toward questions of sex and marriage is found in student-edited publications. In these open forums those views of college morality are aired for which sophomoric ears are eagerly cupped. A few items from our files of recent years demonstrate the tone in typical portions of the student press.
The Yale Record, which in undergraduate life at Yale University is looked on as the publication for expressions of wit, humor, and satire, was banned from New Haven news-stands by the police.
A holiday number of the Pitt Panther, humorous monthly publication of the University of Pittsburgh, was suppressed by Chancellor John G. Bouman because of its cover, which he characterized as "bad taste."
The editor of the Wampus, University of Southern California student publication, was expelled with three others for publishing "shady" pictures in the magazine.
For the first time in its eighty-three years the Nassau Lit, as the Nassau Literary Magazine is known on the campus at Princeton, was barred from circulation.
The editor of the Syracuse University comic magazine, the Orange Peel, was forced to resign because his magazine published the results of a suggestive questionnaire pertaining to student morals.
The editor of Cento, student publication of Center College, Kentucky, was disciplined because of an editorial "Stupidity of Marriage," in which he asserted that marriage "ends in wrecked lives and the casting of ugly blemishes on young lives having to come into contact with it."
A lewd article in Occident, a University of California campus literary magazine, caused the expulsion of its editor because, in the words of President V. W. Campbell, "the article is unbelievably vile. If the pamphlet were sent through the United States mail, the sender in my opinion would be liable to a heavy fine or to a long term of imprisonment at hard labor or both."
Both editor and staff reporter of the Pacific University Index were expelled from the Oregon institution because of an article which college officials claimed to be "destructive to morals, indecent, and obscene."
Student editors of the Harvard Lampoon, humorous monthly, faced criminal action when their magazine was banned from news-stand sale and barred from the mails. Police Chief Leahy (Cambridge, Mass.) said he believed the magazine, its pictures, and other allegedly offensive matter to be obscene and blasphemous.
Speaking at the 1937 baccalaureate services of Lafayette College, Dean Irving H. Berg, New York University College of Liberal Arts, mercilessly flayed collegiate humor in this summary review: "The so-called humorous publications emanating from various college and university campuses seem to deal exclusively with the subject of sex. This is deplorable. It indicates an attitude of mind which doesn’t know what is really funny. Many situations in life are ludicrous; but they are not necessarily nasty."
In this environment, where some professors preach a revolution of morals and their students often try to practice what they hear preached, we find the potentialities of driving disaster. It is the atmosphere in which college killers, prodigies (one, a Phi Beta Kappa student, with a high I. Q.) who gloat over the perversions of human nature, could thrive until the most brutal crime in recent years brought them behind penitentiary bars for life. Breathing this atmosphere, students at the University of Rochester, a Baptist institution, formed the Damned Souls Society to prove the necessity of atheism and to abolish belief in God and all religion based on that belief. In New Haven the Yale Freethinkers’ Society was organized with twenty-five charter members. In the very State where the Scopes trial attracted worldwide attention a group of students at the University of Tennessee formed a Society for the Advancement of Atheism. All over the country college men have applauded the efforts of the A. A. A. A. for the establishment of atheistic societies in every university. It is in this sophistication of sin, masquerading under the dignity of higher education, that young lives have been ruined and the hope of happiness dissolved in the crucibles of atheistic, anti-moral "science falsely so called."
This moral and religious breakdown cannot be checked as long as American colleges aim at the exclusion of Christian ethics from their theories of human conduct. Jesus said: "Without Me ye can do nothing" (John 15:5), and there is no field of human endeavor in which the startling verity of these six words is more clearly demonstrated than in our twentieth-century educational programs. We have concentrated on a pagan development of the brain, with the result that Lord Chesterfield's apprehensions of educating men without religion and making them clever devils have materialized. We train the mind, but not the heart. We impart knowledge, but not wisdom. We strive for the body, but not for the soul. As long as evil is glossed over; as long as human depravity is explained away as a "complex," inherent evil reduced to "bad taste," and sin, to use an academic definition, labeled as the "survival of a medieval superstition by which the Church wields control over its adherents," our universities will continue to produce some of the super criminals of our age, leaders in the breakdown of the American home and in the demolition of marriage morals.
In raising a voice of warning against this menace, we are not fighting higher education itself. The Church has no quarrel with pure science. It was the revival of true religion in the Reformation that gave real rebirth to a full appreciation of liberal arts. The Church since Luther's day has been a torch-bearer in the darkness of ignorance.
Neither has the Church discouraged college attendance. It recognizes the contribution which intellectual training makes to our country today, when more than 85 per cent of those enrolled in Who's Who and 92 per cent of those listed in American Young Men are college graduates. It has rather encouraged its youth to improve its opportunities and to equip itself for responsible positions of leadership. The one reservation on which the Church has laid unswerving insistence is the avowed recognition that "the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (Prov. 9:10) and the moral basis for the intelligent appraisal of all social questions. It has always extended both a friendly caution against campus attacks on spirituality and a friendly plea for true virtue as St. Paul outlines it to the students in Christy school of grace: "Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things" (Phil. 4:8).
It becomes the duty of all Christian students, then, to avoid, as far as possible, those courses where godless teachers have raised the Red flag of radical irreligion; to accept this situation under protest if attendance at these lectures is compulsory; and by personal prayer as well as by faithful worship at church and attendance at the Sacrament to steel their faith against the onslaughts of materialistic and mechanistic philosophies. It is for their moral and spiritual support that the Church has established university chapels in some of the larger educational centers and called student-pastors, whose advice will go far in helping the spiritual life of the student.
Christian parents, on the other hand, should not be unmindful of the advantages which the smaller Christian college lays before them when the question of choosing the school for their children is to be answered. There is a distinct trend toward the revaluation of the smaller school, where undergraduates often receive more individual attention and are better prepared than in the standardized process of mass education. In these colleges, where the reverent regard of the Scriptures pervades the entire curricular structure and where Christian ethics are emphasized in the relations between young men and women, the nation has a generous supply of that salt of the earth which will help preserve it against the decay of brilliant godlessness.