MORAL EMOTIONALISM

In the address of Mr. Chase of the Watch and Ward Society delivered at the Liberal Club yesterday and quoted to some extent in this morning's CRIMSON there is revealed an emotionalism verging on the incredible, yet nevertheless tangent to the same circle of sincere religious experience known to less fervent minds. That a majority of the college will thus esteeem it is improbable. Youth, after all, is not essentially liberal.

But neither is any community of same and sophisticated people ever sufficiently broad minded to allow, without some kind of stone throwing, the importunities of the moral emotionalist. And that is exactly what the leader of the Watch and Ward Society must be, in the light of his words. Nor is he completely damned by so being. Such people may sometime enjoy their Miltonesque heaven where the inhibitions of today become the exhibitions of a celestial tomorrow, and one can play on the harps of a divine reward while less consistent devotees of moral restraint suffer a punishment entirely fitting and quite proper. But that is extremely doubtful. Yet it is equally doubtful whether they will be doomed for their emotionalism even as their contemporaries are blessed for their sanity.

Mr. Mencken may hold a higher place than Mr. Chase in the minds of Harvard students. He stands on the side most congenial to their manner of thinking. Mr. Chase is to most a perpetuation in singularly disturbing form of the unattractive hypocrisies of a decadent and disastrous yesterday. Yet he believes that he is as honest and progressive a citizen of Boston as is Mr. Mencken of Baltimore. And in his thinking that lies a certain grandeut of faith which too often is slighted by the clever and the essentially national