For a Living Memorial

The Editor of the CRIMSON:

The Reverend George L. Paine, in his letter in today's CRIMSON presenting the orthodox view in favour of the erection of a chapel as a War Memorial, grants by implication that perhaps the most important object of a War Memorial is to aid in removing the possibility of future war.

To fulfill this function, the memorial must be such as to provide an ever-present and active appeal to as many elements in the University as possible. That a chapel (or even compulsory attendance at chapel as we may see from our Yale neighbors) does not engender among the students an attitude of spiritual exaltation, scarcely requires proof, not is it strange. The student of today, and above all Harvard, has no use for the forms of religion. He lives in an age, as well as in a period of his own life, of revaluation of primary moral and intellectual conceptions; his comfortable faiths and prejudices when tested with experience and the white light of intellectual criticism reveal the bare skeleton of dogma, and as such become abhorrent. That he goes too far in rejecting the background of faith is the charge made categorically against him by the self-righteous and captious critic, who does not realize that it is only by passing through such a necessary and purgative period of testing and examination that youth can establish a valuable intellectual and moral foundation upon which to build his life.

At any rate, whatever may be the cause, the fact is that a chapel with make no appeal to the majority of students, nor in a few years will its function be even remembered, as the present-day attitude towards Mem Hall Shows. If our object is in reality to aid the cause of education against war, let us take practical steps to that end through a Professor's Chair, or international scholarships, or some such means, rather than by raising merely another monument to the hypocrisy and futility of the Human face. Chester T. Lane '26.