PARIETALS AND RELIGION

To the Editors or the CRIMSON:

Much more melancholy than the controversy on parietal rules and the various, often ludicrous aspects of inspection and enforcement is the abandonment by most of the defenders of "conventional morality" of the only defensible basis for their position. While there certainly are strong social and psychological arguments for restraint in sexual matters, as is clearly demonstrated by the fact that the psychiatrists, of all people, are leading the defense of convention, such arguments usually have an unstable foundation because of the difficulty of defining their values, such as emotional maturity, healthy eroticism, and so on. It does not take an historian to recall that in our society at any rate, conventional morality has its origin not in social and psychological considerations but in the commandments of God.

Society recognizes that the commandment against murder can be ignored on a large scale only at great cost to itself. It is not surprising that the psychiatrists' offices are filled with many who are discovering that the same thing is true of the equally divine injunction against sexual immorality. The product of the same Author, the seventh commandment (or sixth as the Romans count them) has like authority with the sixth (against murder) or the eighth (against stealing). Ignore this rather fundamental reality, and you come up against the cutting edge of all the commandments of the almighty God: you don't break them, they break you. Harold O. J. Brown '53   United Ministry to Students

(A review of last Friday's HRO concert will appear in tomorrow's CRIMSON.--Ed. Note.)