MAY 8 19: 
 
 RELIGION AND TH ' ' 
 UNDERGRADUATE 
 
 Four Addresses delivered at 
 
 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 
 
 March, 1915 
 
 BY 
 
 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE FACULTY OF ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 With an Introduction by 
 i PRESIDENT JOHN GRIER HIBBEN 
 
 Published under the auspices of 
 The Daily Princetonian " 
 
 Pncf, 30 Cents 
 
MAY 8 1! 
 
 RELIGION AND TH 
 UNDERGRADUATE 
 
 Four Addresses delivered at 
 
 PRINCETON UNIVERSITY 
 
 March, 1915 
 
 BY 
 
 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 PRESIDENT OF THE FACULTY OF ANDOVER THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY 
 
 With an Introduction by 
 PRESIDENT JOHN GRIER HIBBEN 
 
 Published under the auspices of 
 " The Daily Princetonian " 
 
 Pricf, SO Cents 
 
The interest aroused by the series of addresses delivered 
 by Dr. Albert P. Fitch before the students of Princeton Univer- 
 sity on March 14, 15, 16 and 17 made it evident that these should 
 be put into some permanent form. They are now published 
 under the auspices of The Daily Princetonian after thorough 
 revision by Dr. Fitch, and with his kind permission. 
 
 The following facts concerning the religious meetings at which 
 Dr. Fitch spoke may be of general enough interest to warrant 
 their being set down here. The attendance the first night was 
 about 900, on the second and third nights about 1000 each, and on 
 the last night 1100. There presided on successive evenings Presi- 
 dent Hibben, Rev. Ralph B. Pomeroy, rector of Trinity Church, 
 Princeton, Professor R. M. McElroy, and Professor L. H. Miller. 
 The management of the meetings was in the hands of the Rev. 
 J. Nevin Sayre 'OT and J. M. Colt '14, officers of the Philadelphian 
 Society. To these men, together with the large number of 
 undergraduates who gave generously of their time and energies 
 in preparing the University for Dr. Fitch's visit, belongs the credit 
 for the most successful event of the sort in Princeton's history. 
 
 H. F. Armstrong 
 J. S. Nicholas 
 
 Additional copies may be obtained at The University Store, 
 30 cents; or will be sent postpaid for 35 cents upon application 
 to D. M. Roy, care Princeton University Press, Princeton, N. J. 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 Dr. Fitch's addresses have left a profound impression upon the 
 heart and mind Princeton. The unprecedently large attendance of 
 our undergraduates at Dr. Fitch's meetings, for four consecutive 
 evenings, their eager interest and sustained attention during his 
 closely reasoned presentation of the fundamentals of Christian truth, 
 their ready response to his appeal as to the claims of Christ upon 
 the American young manhood of to-day are facts of deep significance 
 as regards the spirit of religion in the University. In a place 
 devoted to the pursuit of learning, where our students are brought 
 face to face with the great world problems of the past and of 
 the present, and are ever encouraged to think their way into and 
 through these problems, it would be strange indeed were their 
 thoughts never particularly directed to the serious consideration 
 of the place of religion in their lives. 
 
 Dr. Fitch's knowledge of the temper and disposition of young men, 
 of what they think and how they feel, as well as his evident love 
 for them and his yearning for their highest interests, his loyalty 
 to "the simplicity that is in Christ," his exceptional powers of acute 
 analysis, and his spirit of reverence and devotion, have served to 
 put old truths in a new light and force them upon the attention and 
 conviction of the many minds open to such a challenge. 
 
 John Gkier Hibben. 
 
FOREWORD 
 
 The following addresses were delivered without notes and are 
 here reproduced, with corrections and emendations, from the steno- 
 graphic reports. They are very faulty and imperfect witnesses to 
 the joy and freedom, the beauty and power, of the spiritual life. 
 There would be no slightest justification in giving them the dreadful 
 perpetuity of print except that they may serve as a reminder, to 
 those who heard them, of the evident grace and power of God 
 which dwelt among us those four days when, as a great body of 
 alert and eager youth, we thought together, simply and sincerely, 
 on the most solemn and most pressing questions of the human soul. 
 And I could wish that every undergraduate who reads the ensuing 
 pages might feel that their teaching comes to him again, as a direct 
 personal message, full of love and faith and cheer, from a grateful 
 and joyous servant of the Lord Jesus, who is once more talking 
 with his brothers and comrades in Princeton University. 
 
 A. P. F. 
 25 March, 1915 
 
I 
 
 WHAT IS RIUJGION AND WHAT HAS IT TO OFFER 
 THE EDUCATED MAN? 
 
 I cannot begin the first of these addresses without expressing tlie 
 keen sense of pleasure and the overwhelming consciousness of re- 
 sponsibility with which I undertake the task. There is no one in 
 the world quite like the American undergraduate ; you are the most 
 lovable and the most exasperating creatures God ever made, an 
 extraordinary combination of perversity and promise, genius and 
 childishness. But in your hands lies the future of this Republic ; 
 by virtue of your youth and your place here and the education which 
 this place offers, you are to be, whether we will or no, the leaders 
 of the coming generation. With what eager and wistful joy then, 
 do we older men who have lost youth — the greatest gift of the gods 
 — but who love and revere it in you who face the morning; with 
 what sense of solemn accountability mingling with our joy, do we, 
 out of our knowledge and experience speak to your inexperience, 
 your faith, your ready idealism. 
 
 And that sense of responsibility is the greater because of the 
 theme of these discussions. Religion is the most serious, the most 
 permanent and inclusive interest of human beings. The sex hunger, 
 the desire for food and clothing, the passion to understand ourselves 
 and the universe in which we live — these are the great motor im- 
 pulses of our race, and the third is the most inclusive of them all. 
 No man understands any thing about religion unless he realizes that 
 it is a central and abiding factor in human progress and human 
 destiny. There is something very moving in realizing that we share 
 the interest which has brought us together tonight, with all our 
 brothers. Brown and yellow and black and white, a great company 
 which no man can number, they stand upon common ground with 
 us here. Our race is one in its common and associated sin. its com- 
 mon desire for truth and righteousness, its common need of grace and 
 pardon, God's common occupation of us all. And this makes it 
 clear enough that, in his need of religion and his sense of its supreme 
 reality and importance, the educated man in no way differs from 
 
6 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 his less fortunate brothers. How contemptible would be the spirit- 
 ual pride and self-complacency of any of us who imagined there was 
 one sort of religion for the scholar and another for the man in the 
 street ! No ! Nevertheless in the expression and use of our religion 
 certain obligations rest upon us, by virtue of the opportunities given 
 us in this place, which do not rest upon less educated men. We 
 ought to take our religion with intelligence as well as feeling, with 
 discriminating and clear-seeing passion. We are under solemn obli- 
 gations to state it with moral candor and intellectual integrity, in the 
 language of our own time from the point of view of our own 
 day ; and to apply it, with sincerity and courage to the fears and 
 hopes, the sins and follies of our own generation. It may justly 
 be expected that we will make the expression of religion as free and 
 simple and sincere as the importance and reality of it are fundamental 
 and unchanging. 
 
 We come then to our first question: what is religion? and if we 
 take it in the broad and universal sense we find no difficulty in its 
 answer. Religion is that great mass of speculations and faiths which 
 has grown out of a twofold human experience. Perhaps you will re- 
 member that this definition implies that experience, furnishes both 
 the material and the authority of the religious life. Now it is impor- 
 tant to understand that. Religion is not the creation of a book or 
 priests, or governments, or institutions. It is not imposed upon us 
 from without by churches or creeds or ministers or parents. It is an 
 essential, not an accidental, thing and it comes from within. It 
 springs out of the heart of our race ; from the deep centers of human 
 fears, human joy, human terror and helplessness, human aspira- 
 tion and insight, it issues. Therefore the reality and authority of 
 religion are as veritable and undeniable as the experience which pro- 
 duces it is universal and intelligible. Let us get clear, at the outset, 
 that religion is not the product of its many organized and conven- 
 tional manifestations. It made them ; it was not made by them. 
 
 But what is this twofold experience of our race out of which 
 religion issues? In a word it is the sense of the supermundane nature 
 of reality, — the perception that the significance and power of the 
 universe lie behind, are hidden within, its visible and temporal ex- 
 pressions — coujiled with the sense that man has somehow separated 
 himself from this invisible and potent reality and that it is of the 
 first importance to us to get in touch with it, be reconciled to it, 
 again. This is what William James refers to when he speaks of ''the 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 7 
 
 profoiiiid uneasiness of the race, tlic sense of there being something 
 wrong about us as we naturally stand." What is life? \Vc do not 
 know; we can only get at it through its various manifestations. 
 Something potent, like a blind will, stirs in the soil. It sends up 
 shoots of green, it grows into a tree with trunk and bark and leaves 
 and branches. It towers to the heavens, by and by it droops and 
 decays and falls. It descends to mother earth again, there to lie 
 through countless years. At length we dig it up in hard black lumps ; 
 we place fire beneath it and it breaks forth in flame, and flame passes 
 into heat and the heat passes out again, in some new form of 
 invisible power, back into the cosmos. What was it, moving, urging, 
 directing, transforming through soil and sapling and tree and rotten 
 wood and coal and heat and light and lire? We do not know. But 
 something, the real thing, which alone gave significance and value to 
 all this process, was there. Now men have always been aware of 
 this invisible elusive force and that we are ever moving about in 
 worlds not realized ; have seen that behind all the splendor and 
 energy and achievement and material wonder of the universe is 
 immaterial and unseen spirit directing and producing it all. Some- 
 times we call that spirit Nemesis or Fate; sometimes "the Something 
 not ourselves that makes for Righteousness," most often we call 
 it "God." 
 
 And side by side with this high sense of the ''presence that dis- 
 turbs us with the joy of elevated thoughts," is the sense of loneliness 
 and fear and estrangement from that presence. Between the two, 
 the Eternal Spirit unseen but felt, and the hesitant and uncertain 
 and blinded spirit of a man, there would seem to be a great gulf fixed. 
 Our world has already been a searching and troubled and baffled 
 world. It has not known where to find Him! The altars, with their 
 smoking sacrifices upon a thousand hills, the shrines and temples and 
 penances and pilgrimages, all bear witness to the human sense of a 
 divine and changeless reality and the human inability to find that 
 reality and abide in peace and power within it. To put all this in 
 conventional and hence comparatively meaningless phrases, the two 
 universal elements in religion — any and every religion — are the sense 
 of sin and the sense of God. 
 
 Now Christianity is the particular interpretation and completion 
 of this experience brought into the world by Jesus Christ. First 
 Jesus, in his teaching and person, proves that man's dream of an 
 eternal and Suijrenie Being is true; partly because he teaches so 
 
8 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 satisfying and adequate a conception of that Being, and far more 
 because he Hves out in a human life the nature and the grace of God 
 of which he speaks. This is what we mean by the doctrine of the 
 Incarnation, by the sublime name for Jesus, Emanuel — *'God-with- 
 us," by saying that in Him, for us men and our salvation, God is 
 "made manifest in the flesh." The first glad message of Christianity 
 is that in Jesus Christ there is completely revealed for us the char- 
 acter of God. 
 
 Now you will notice just what I said there. One does not claim 
 that Jesus knew everything, that he revealed the entire mind of God, 
 completely transcending the intellectual limitations of his time and 
 place. One does not claim that he was a supreme aesthetic genius, 
 the incarnation of final and eternal beauty. No one thinks that he 
 fulfilled the speculative ideas of deity; that he was "the absolute," 
 whatever that may mean; that he was omniscient, or omnipresent, 
 or omnipotent. So far as I know no first-rate theologian in the 
 Christian church has ever identified Jesus of Nazareth with Deity. 
 But we do know, out of two thousand years of experience, that 
 Jesus does reveal, incarnate, the moral nature of God, that in Him 
 God's character, of long-suffering, forgiving, redeeming, self-giving 
 love is perfectly revealed. And when I use that word "perfectly" 
 again I draw from the misleading vocabulary of the absolute, and 
 I can only mean by it that Jesus sets forth wholly, so far as a human 
 being can understand or need it, what the heart of the Eternal, 
 the motive, the passion, the purpose, the spirit of Deity is. "God" 
 is the religious term for the ultimate; we think of the ultimate in 
 the realm of the intellect as truth, in the realm of feeling as beauty, 
 in the realm of personality, the highest and most inclusive realm, 
 as God. Now there is but one adequate idea of a supreme moral 
 and spiritual being in the world, and that is the idea of a Holy 
 and Righteous Father, making his sun to shine on the evil and on the 
 good, sending his rain on the just and on the unjust, giving us his 
 love not according to our desert but according to our need, more 
 willing to hear than we to pray, forever forgiving and redeeming 
 every soul that returns itself to him. 
 
 This is the sublime idea of the Christian God and this is Jesus. 
 His teaching he derives in essence from the j^ast, it completes what 
 the great prophets of his race had begun. But he supremely em- 
 powers and proves that teaching in action. The idea of God be- 
 comes in him an experience of (iod, drawn out of the depths and 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 9 
 
 immensities of his own victorious and perfected spirit. Thus when 
 we think of the love of God, we think of the love of Jesus — 
 weeping over Jerusalem, calling little children unto Him, stooping 
 with infinite gentleness to blind Bartimeus, blessing beggar and 
 leper, harlot and centurion, publican and pharisee alike. And when 
 we think of the forgiving, redeeming grace of God again wc think 
 of Jesus; who restored her self-respect to the woman taken in 
 adultery, who forgave Peter his chsloyalty and cowardice, who 
 looked upon Zaccheus and believed in him and brought him back 
 from thievery and trickery to honor, who hung, all exposed and 
 helpless upon his Cross, an innocent victim, and asked God to 
 pardon the men who put Him there! 
 
 Here then is the first reason why Jesus holds the supreme 
 place in our religion. He incarnates our dream ; he makes men 
 know and see the living God in his own person. This does not 
 mean that in Him, a finite being, dwelt the fullness of the infinite. 
 That is manifestly impossible, and if it were possible, it would be 
 entirely unintelligible to us. And he would have been the first 
 to deny it. In the same breath in which he said, *T and my Father 
 are one," which was true, he also said, "My Father is greater than 
 I," which was true too. No one ever so looked up to God, so 
 relinquished himself to the eternal Being, so worshiped and 
 adored the Infinite as Jesus did. But Jesus was one in essence 
 with the Divine Life. Just as the land-locked bay is a part of the 
 ocean, and the same water lies within and without the headlands, 
 and in the bay is everything of the quality and nature of the far- 
 flung shining sea, so the ocean of Infinite Being, its character and 
 gracious power, within the limits of a human personality, was 
 present in Jesus. 
 
 And that brings us to the second thing in Christianity. If Jesus 
 takes the first experience of the race, the awareness of Eternal 
 Spirit, and confirms it and incarnates it in character, he takes the 
 second experience also, the sense of uneasiness and estrangement, 
 and does away with it, shows men how to find and live with the 
 Eternal, reconciles the human soul to its Creator. Now we are 
 come to the very heart of the Gospel— the glad tidings of great joy 
 for all people. For Jesus lived and was this Divinity in a veritable 
 human life, and that for the express purpose that through and by 
 Him all men might see and know that they could live it too. God 
 forgives, said Jesus, the Lamb was slain in the heart of the 
 
10 * ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 Eternal from the foundation of the world ; He has never turned 
 himself away from any of you; you have but to turn back and re- 
 ceive his grace and then you too can live the free and radiant life ; I 
 am here to proclaim, to prove it, to die for it that you may believe. 
 And Jesus does prove it ! For his life, which uttered the God-life, 
 was a genuine and veritable human life. He was not "some radiant 
 god who might despise us quite," — he was a man. He felt, he 
 saw, he thought, he wondered, he lived and moved just as do you 
 and I. He knew perplexity, temptation, discouragement, failure ; he 
 understood the sorrow and the loneliness of human Hfe. This 
 potent, ardent life, which was one with Deity in purity and deed 
 and purpose; this brave and generous and unsullied heart, which 
 beat in steady free accord with the heart of God, was in a man like 
 us. The revelation of the character of God, the Incarnation, is 
 not in some unique unparalleled different order of being; it is in 
 our Brother, the Elder Brother of us all. 
 
 And now you must see for yourselves what it is that religion has 
 to offer — that it brings indeed the supreme and ineffable gift to us 
 all. For this revelation in Jesus of the life of God lived in a human 
 life, as the true life of man, brought a new power into history, 
 wiped out the terror of the eternal, made men know that they, if 
 they will believe in Jesus, trust him and follow him, can be godlike 
 too. This is the most wonderful thing about Jesus; his life, be- 
 cause it incarnates the vision, enables other men to get it too. You 
 who have never been his disciples, you who love to find, as you 
 so easily can, much in the Christian Church of error and sin and 
 cowardice and obscurantism, never forget this: Christianity isn't 
 a form of ideas, a doctrine, a creed, a philosophy, an ethic ; it isn't 
 a rich tradition, a rite, a ceremony ; it is a moral power, a spiritual 
 force, residing in, brought to us by, the victorious life and person of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ. 
 
 What then can his religion do for you? It is hard to answer that 
 question adequately before this audience because you are living, 
 for these four years, in an unreal world, where reality is obscured. 
 This is a well-ordered, carefully protected homogeneous and highly 
 educated community, representing the best and selected spirits out of 
 a vast multitude. The average of character is high, the measure of 
 success is large. We know no savage struggle for existence, — de- 
 corous, polished and comfortable as we are. Therefore we lose the 
 power to understand the conditions of the outside world, we have 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE ii 
 
 lost touch with llic stark realities, tlic brutal facts, the elemental 
 struggle of human life. But all around this sheltered favored spot 
 lies the real world upon which this, and every other similar com- 
 munity depends. You must look at that real world if you want to 
 see what religion means ! Here is the laborer — let us say the farm- 
 hand. His hours are not fixed by labor unions ; his feet are blis- 
 tered for weeks as they follow the plough, his bones wake him for 
 their aching of a night; he wears unclean garments, he works and 
 sleeps with unclean malodorous fellow workmen. He has little 
 choice of food — his body is under-nourished and dyspeptic, he 
 trembles, always trembles inwardly from overexertion and exhaus- 
 tion and severe heat. There is little or no probability for anything 
 better for him in this life. But this man has heard of Jesus and 
 believes in him and loves and trusts him. His very soul hangs on 
 Jesus. He keeps saying to himself : there is a God and He does 
 know and care, and He loves me, and somewhere, somehow He 
 will make it all up to me if I only believe and follow. What does 
 religion mean to your brother, the day laborer? It means all the 
 difference between heaven and hell, blank, dull misery and hope 
 and joy! Here is the little nation of the Belgians, everything des- 
 troyed. The ways of peace, the arts of industry and commerce, 
 the homes of learning, the houses of faith, the young men who 
 should have been the begetters of the coming generation, all are 
 laid low. Their homes are burned, their land made waste. But 
 these Belgians have heard of Jesus and the God of Jesus. Oh the 
 sublime tragedy and wonder of it that all over that stricken land 
 today old men and maidens, young men and children are lifting up 
 their hands to the wide heavens and praying not cursing — saying: 
 Our Father which art in Heaven, give us this day our daily bread ! 
 What can religion do for them? It can turn them from madness, 
 from despair, to humble quietness and a great faith and hope. It 
 can keep life, even under sucJi conditions, from being intolerable! 
 And what can it do for you, the educated youth ? Well, here is a 
 man who does not believe there is a God ; but we look at Jesus and 
 we have to believe it for He is what we mean by God. Or here 
 is a man who doesn't believe in himself— the evil weight of the 
 custom, the deadness of the world has gripped him. There isn't any 
 hope, you say, that I can love our human life again and be made 
 over! And then we look at Jesus, tempted in all points like as 
 ^ve are — living the holy joyous life among the unholy and making 
 
12 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 them holy too, and he makes us dare to believe that we can try 
 again. Or we have made up our minds that the only things in life 
 that are real are money and comfort and fame and power and 
 "success'' ; that the only principle worth striving for is the economic 
 principle; that we believe in the survival of the fittest, and we are 
 out for ourselves, and we mean to come out on top! There are 
 many men in this college who have given themselves up to just that 
 brutal paganism. And then we look at Jesus and we know better, 
 and we see that the law of life is love not might, service not con- 
 quest, that manhood means to save not to exploit. We see that 
 we are selling our souls for silver, that even youth will do that 
 and we are ready to die for shame and we abhor ourselves, and 
 once more our true manhood rises in awe and tears out of our 
 repentant souls and Jesus has brought us to ourselves ! 
 
 Or we have given up all thought of a morally victorious life ; we 
 are used to sin ; to cheating and lying and gambling and drunken- 
 ness and impurity — hundreds of us are used to just these things. 
 We accept it dully as a matter of course, and then again we look 
 at Jesus. He lives his life under just as hard, yea harder conditions 
 than ours, and he never gives in; he always holds to the light and 
 peace of moral victory. And he stretches out his hand, across 
 the chasm of the years to us, yes! even to us, saying, "Come 
 brother, come ! Don't be afraid. Get up and be a man ! Lo, I am 
 with you alway even unto the end of the world!" Then, seeing his 
 gracious radiant figure, great tides of love and sorrow rise in 
 our miserable hearts and we say, "O God! that's not for me!" and 
 Jesus always answers, "Yes! for you!" And we say "O God, for- 
 give and help me, O Jesus, I come, I come !" And by that flood of 
 pure emotion the old channels in the brain are washed away and 
 new ones begin to form and Christ becomes for us, as for all the 
 world, the sanctuary of our broken humanity! 
 
 Do you not see then what religion has to ofifer you, the educated 
 man, you, who just because of a developed and enriched personality 
 must often fight the harder with the sins of the flesh and the sins of 
 the spirit? Don't you see how real and simple and possible it all is? 
 There's nothing arbitrary or mechanical in that redemption ; nothing 
 out of the uniform moral order; no scheme, no transaction, no 
 petty, mysterious device. It is sublime ; but it is all natural, all 
 possible, all real. Surely you do want it ! "Come unto Him all ye 
 that labor and are heavy laden. He will give you rest!" 
 
II 
 
 WHY MEN LOSE THEIR IvMTII IX COLLEGE 
 
 We did not truly accomplish anything last night unless the ad- 
 dress brought home to us the naturalness and the normality of the 
 religious life. Indeed the chief purpose of that initial talk was to 
 make clear how veritable and precious are the gifts religion Ijrings 
 and how deep-seated and universal the instincts which it interprets. 
 Far from being something repressive and ascetic, something arbi- 
 trary, mysterious, unpleasant, imposed upon a man's life, we saw 
 it to be rather a profound and joyous interpretation of the central 
 forces and the deepest needs within life. It may therefore surprise 
 some of us that we should devote this evening to dealing with the 
 difficulties of belief, since we have already spent an hour in trying 
 to show how intelligible to the mind and how grateful to the spirit 
 religion is. 
 
 Yet this is the very reason why we must examine the other side 
 of the shield now. The religious life was presented from one point 
 of view last night and the facts of experience given only tlieir re- 
 ligious interpretation. And it would be unfair to you if the oppos- 
 ing, — the non-religious interpretation of experience — were not also 
 frankly stated here. For to acquire and maintain a great religious 
 faith is not simple or easy for many clear thinking men ; indeed few 
 things in human life, that are worth anything, can be gained except 
 through much struggle and effort, many battlings with our doubts 
 and' fears. Discipleship of Jesus is, to be sure, a blessedly simple 
 matter of the good will, the repentant, loving, trusting heart ; and 
 when will and heart have been really given to his keeping the 
 truth of His teaching and His person is revealed and verified in the 
 changed life and experience. But that initial decision, that first 
 step of faith, which, like all first steps, costs — is often hard enough 
 to take, simple as it is, because Jesus' interpretation of human ex- 
 perience, his revelation and Incarnation of the Divine Spirit cer- 
 tainly have to face many things in human life and many aspects 
 of the natural world which make them difficult of acceptance 
 And it is of these things that we must now speak. 
 
14 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 But first, let us bear our witness against two wide-spread falla- 
 cies which are wrapped up in this whole matter of undergraduate 
 doubt. It is not, for instance, true that men lose their faith in 
 college because the college itself is a godless place. On the con- 
 trary there are few, if any, places in this country where ethical 
 and spiritual leadership is clearer and stronger than in our schools 
 and universities. More and more the moral and religious forces 
 of the nation are centering in them. No one who knows the 
 college from the inside fails to understand that there is probably 
 no place where it is easier to do right and harder to do wrong than 
 here. When you reflect upon the low level of conversation, manners, 
 standards, outlook, which your brothers who are not collegians 
 have to meet in commercial and industrial life, in the shop and 
 factory and market and street, then you realize how favorable for 
 faith and character is your environment here. You can never 
 excuse yourself for your wrong doing by falling back upon the 
 "great temptations" of college life. It must, on the other hand, be 
 a sobering and humiliating fact to realize that if here, under such 
 comparatively ideal conditions, life slips out of moral self-control, 
 how much worse is it likely to be when you leave these sheltering 
 academic walls. No! a man who goes to the bad here does so in 
 spite of the college not because of it! 
 
 Again it is not true that undergraduates lose their faith because 
 men of your age are naturally, irreligious. On the contrary if 
 history proves anything, it proves that young men are profoundly 
 and instinctively religious. No one is more interested in funda- 
 mental experience, more desirous of attacking the insoluble prob- 
 lems ; the world's great religious leaders have been, for the most 
 part, young men. It is true that youth has a ruthless passion for 
 reality and that it will not be satisfied with any religion whose 
 inherent reasonableness it cannot perceive. But to say that you 
 are irreligious is fundamental heresy. It needs no argument to 
 show that we come into the morning of life "trailing clouds of glory 
 from Heaven our native place" and that then we are very keenly 
 aware of all there is in heaven and earth that our philosophy has 
 never dreamed of ! 
 
 No! the reason for our acute religious doubts and fears is more 
 fundamental than these. It is incidental to, inseparable from, the 
 whole process of quick transition from youth to manhood which 
 the college course accomplishes. You are now come to that place 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 15 
 
 where you must pass over from obedience to freedom ; from a 
 faith which comes from without to the faith that is born within; 
 here you give up second-hand experiences inherited from home 
 and school and the past, and gain first-hand ones for yourselves. 
 It is this whole precious but perilous process of piercing beneath 
 form to substance, beneath expression to reality which, in any 
 department of human living, and nowhere so much so as here, 
 disturbs old faiths and calls for a readjustment of positions. The 
 first great reason why faith declines here is because of the difficulty 
 of squaring an inherited religion with the new and overwhelming 
 accession of fresh views and facts which the college course brings. 
 
 Now that difficulty will usually take one of three forms. If a 
 man studies natural science here, and no one can be educated 
 today and not study it, he will at once perceive that the religious 
 interpretation of life, which declares that the highest and only 
 right law of conduct is the law of loving and unselfish and sacri- 
 ficial service runs directly counter to the natural law of conquest, 
 of self-gratification, of the surv'ival of the fittest. You see that the 
 law of the physical universe appears to be the law of doing the 
 easiest, the most obvious things. The suns and stars and planets 
 do not swing in perfect orbits, in correct circles. On the contrary 
 they follow that somewhat deviating and crooked course in which 
 the balancing and counteracting influences of other suns and planets 
 leaves the least resistance. You see that the beginnings of human 
 life came about through the operation of this same law that might 
 is right; that the man who has superior strength or cunning or 
 genius always comes out on top. You see the early primitive 
 groups maintaining their corporate integrity over against other 
 similar groups, not by disciplining or purifying their natural fierce, 
 cruel and lustful desires, but by a splendidly aggressive, magnifi- 
 cently brutal exploitation of them. You also see that this pagan 
 law of ruthless conquest, physical pleasure and material might is 
 still the dominating principle of most of our present life. And 
 you say "All this gives the lie to Christianity; human existence 
 and progress depend upon the law which is the very opposite of 
 gentleness and love !" 
 
 Well, it is true that human life begins at the level and very like 
 unto the life of the brute. It is true that in the beginning might 
 is right and restraint means hindrance, and men give rein to im- 
 pulse and passion. But it is also true that after human life has 
 
i6 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 risen to a comparatively low level the whole process changes and 
 that thereafter progress and civilization and human happiness are 
 found only as we thwart cosmic law, oppose it, supplant it with 
 a higher principle. Read Huxley's Evolution and Ethics and see 
 how he answers that question once for all ! It is a matter of 
 incontestable fact that every great forward step in civilization has 
 come when men have had the courage and the insight to accept 
 Jesus' declaration that only in unselfish and helpful and sacrificial 
 living are real joys, permanent rewards, and true progress to be 
 found. Nearly all the characteristic modern expressions of the 
 communal life, the hospital which perpetuates the survival of the 
 unfit, the reformatory which is replacing the prison, the old age 
 pensions, the minimum wage laws, the determined attacks upon 
 the sex and drink traf^c — all these are witnesses that Jesus was 
 right in bidding men accept a religious life and a spiritual law 
 which does indeed oppose and supplant natural law but, by so 
 doing, brings freedom and peace and power into human life. The 
 natural law, if allowed to work unchecked, brings civilization back 
 to barabarism and destruction, plunges men in blood and tears as 
 Europe is plunged now. But the law of the repentant and purified 
 and loving spirit lifts men above the brute and above the body 
 and gives the durable satisfactions, the deeper and more necessary 
 delights. The history of civilization proves Jesus right ; the verdict 
 of experience is for religion, not against it. All that you count 
 most precious in life, your homes, your father's care, your mother's 
 love; all that this great University is giving you so lavishly is 
 yours because Jesus has begun to conquer the natural law and 
 the natural world and made men see that it is more blessed to 
 give than to receive and that gentleness, honor, service, purity are 
 more real, more valuable than everything and anything else the 
 world can give. 
 
 But there is another aspect of human life, which, when we 
 really come to know it for ourselves, makes religion dif^cult of 
 acceptance. If there is a God, and He be a God of long-sufTering 
 redeeming self-giving love, then why is our world so unlike what 
 we should expect such a God to enjoy and make? For our world 
 is full of injustice, sorrow, cruelty. There is inexpressible loneli- 
 ness and painful eflfort in every human life. So many high am- 
 bitious and pure hopes and just desires are withered. Life has 
 so many withheld completions. Children sufTer, women weep, the 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 17 
 
 innocent are punished, the guilty go free! Tlie world looks either 
 as if there was not a God or that He did not care! Is it not all 
 just a great machine, that has no intelligence, no interest, no feeling; 
 are not all our hopes and fears and visions and despairs just 
 curious reactions of the chemistry of our physical being? 
 
 That here are real difficulties with belief no intelligent man 
 could doubt, no honest man deny. But there are real and abiding 
 difficulties with any view of the world and it seems to us that, 
 great as are the difficulties of belief in Jesus and His Gospel, the 
 difficulties of unbelief are yet greater. There is so much in men 
 that is godlike; the most valuable and permanent things in life 
 which can't be explained unless you trace them back to an eternal 
 and beneficent spirit. The noble army of martyrs, the prophets, 
 the saints, the reformers — these are living witnesses to the reality 
 of God and the religious life, in spite of all that we cannot under- 
 stand. All the moral strife and spiritual agony of the world; all 
 the men who have given up their breath for love, their lives for 
 an idea — they are inexplicable, utterly non-understandable unless 
 you believe as Jesus did, and then they and their lives are clear. 
 Moreover in the world of religion, as in any other world, we 
 have a right to rely upon expert testimony. If I want the truth 
 about nature I go to a great scientist; if I want judgment on a 
 painting I seek out the famous artist. If I want expert testimony 
 in religion, I don't go to scientists or artists for it. They are 
 merely laymen in religion. But I go to the supreme religious 
 genuises of our race as is the only logical or fair or intelligent 
 thing to do. And I find that an overwhelming proportion of their 
 number are triumphantly sure of the living, gracious God and 
 the reality of the spiritual world. With Jesus, who towers high 
 over them all, stand Amos, and Hosea and Isaiah and Jeremiah 
 and Paul and John and Augustin and Luther and Calvin and 
 Edwards and Brooks. These are our seers. They are sure of 
 God', as Jesus was sure. With them and Him we rest our case. 
 And besides all this the great and living minds of other nations 
 and other faiths, Socrates and Plato, Emerson, the high and gentle 
 Buddha — all these have had the vision of the Infinite as well, 
 and their lives stand with ours, their experience tallies with the 
 teaching and the life of our Saviour. 
 
 Again, the sudden expansion of knowledge, the rapid develop- 
 ment of intelligence which college life brings, forces another issue 
 
i8 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 to the front. It makes us see that many of our intellectual state- 
 ments of religion are outgrown. They are written in obsolete 
 language, or they were framed from a point of view regarding 
 the universe which is no longer generally held; they need revision, 
 enlargement, emendation. And seeing thus that our theology is 
 faulty and inadequate we confound it, identify it with the religion of 
 which theology is only an expression ; and if we have to discard one 
 we throw away the other too. Here is one of the commonest 
 causes of religious difficulty. We fail to get clear the fundamental 
 distinction between religion which is an art, a way of life, an 
 experience, and theology which is merely the science of that art. 
 Theology is to religion what botany is to flowers, or astronomy is 
 to the stars. The stars and flowers do not essentially change, al- 
 though their respective sciences are constantly changing. So it 
 is with theology and religion. Some one has said that the history 
 of theology is nothing but a long record of discarded errors. It 
 was said, I fancy, as an indictment; it is really highest praise. Of 
 course the science of religion, if it be vital and potent, will be 
 fluid and progressive and always advancing into new truth. A 
 stationary science is a dead science; the crowning tragedy for 
 theology would be the arbitrary fixing of its philosophy of religion 
 in creeds and formulae which should never change. What is 
 the history of medicine or physics or chemistry or astronomy or 
 philosophy except a long and honorable record of discarded errors? 
 No man then, who has a real and precious religious experience 
 should be surprised or alarmed if his idea of it, his intellectual 
 expression of it changes considerably during the expansive period 
 of these four college years. Indeed it is your duty, as educated men 
 to do your part, as in every age great men have done theirs, in 
 freeing religion from outworn or outgrown statements, in relating 
 it to the modern world and that view of the universe which obtains 
 in your generation. That which is most marvellous and most as- 
 suring about the Christian message is that it has shown, during 
 these nineteen hundred years, an amazing comprehensiveness and an 
 exquisite adaptability. You must ally yourselves with the spiritual 
 pioneers, the religious leaders of the other generations and do what 
 they did, what Paul and Augustin and Luther did, take the truth 
 which is eternal and restate it in the language of the moment, giving 
 it such emphases and applications as our needs and our vision may 
 demand. 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 19 
 
 But after all. the reasons why the larp^er number of men lose 
 their faith in college are, I think, personal and moral. Often and 
 often a man will make intellectual skepticism the mere cloak or 
 excuse for moral wrong doing. Or he will lose his faith in God 
 because he has deliberately denied the divine spirit within him- 
 self and lost his own self-respect. One of the most certain and 
 dreadful effects of deliberate sin is moral and spiritual blindness. 
 There is a very solemn word of the Lord Jesus to the effect that 
 only the pure in heart can see God! If there are men here who 
 are not living the lives they ought to live of course they cannot 
 believe! You are afraid to believe; what is even worse you are 
 losing the capacity to believe! And how shall you recover your 
 faith? You must get down on your knees before God and say: 
 *'0 God I am ashamed : I pray to be forgiven, I will give up my 
 sin, hear me for Jesus' sake." If you will do that you will get back 
 your faith again because God Himself, his peace and freedom 
 and power will flow back into your lives. 
 
 Again men lose their faith merely because they won't exercise 
 it. If you learn to play upon the piano and then never touch 
 a piano for ten years you will find you have lost the power to play ; 
 there is nothing surprising in that. If you learn how to exercise 
 and then stop walking and jumping and running, your muscles will 
 go flabby, what else could you expect? And yet there are men who 
 come every day to me and say that they haven't any interest in 
 religion, that it has no power or meaning for them and they imply 
 that this is an indictment of religion. And when I ask them if 
 they read the Bible, why no ! or if they really and regularly pray, 
 why no ! or if they think much on serious and absorbing moral and 
 spiritual themes, why no! Then why should you expect to enjoy 
 religion or to know its power? You have atrophied your religious 
 capacity through disuse. You will never gain more faith till you 
 exercise fully all you now have ; you will lose even that, as sure as 
 sure can be, unless you pay attention to it and develop it. A man 
 must work at his religion as he would work at any other serious 
 and vital matter. 
 
 And finally, men lose their faith because they see so much cold- 
 ness and disloyalty and inconsistency among professing Christian 
 men and women, and this makes the observer cynical and hard. 
 Yet there is very much less of cant and priggishness and hypocrisy 
 in our human world than the youthful onlookers think. We are 
 
20 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 all inconsistent, whether within or without the church, and all fall 
 far below what might justly be expected of us. But for my part at 
 any rate, I am more impressed with the moral heroism, the per- 
 sistent dogged struggle of men towards the light, often under 
 dreadful handicaps of inheritance and environment than I am 
 with their back sliding. And you and I, if we want a man's job, 
 would better come inside the church, come into the company of 
 those who believe, and try to help rather than stand outside and 
 condemn and scorn. And let this be our last word to-night. We 
 have honestly confessed that there are difficulties with belief as 
 there are difficulties with anything in our human world. Yet we 
 think the difficulties of unbelief are greater. This at least is cer- 
 tain. Any man who with perfect freedom and integrity faces his 
 own world — who looks the facts and all the facts and nothing but 
 the facts squarely in the face need find nothing there that makes 
 faith impossible. Faith is indeed an achievement, a glorious 
 achievement. But what rewards it offers in the moral victory and 
 the spiritual dignity which it bestows upon human life! Why 
 not, then, try to achieve, through the message and the grace of 
 Jesus, a high place among the followers and servants of the living 
 God? 
 
Ill 
 
 WHAT IS "SALVATION" AND DO I WANT IT? 
 
 We are come tonight to the first distinctively religious meeting 
 of this series. No man, who is himself possessed of experience 
 and power, has a right to impose his belief upon younger, inex- 
 perienced and plastic lives or to try to bring them to his own con- 
 victions until he has first dealt in all sincerity and candor with the 
 practical problems and intellectual difficulties which he has en- 
 countered. This we have been trying to do in the two preceding 
 lectures, and now, therefore, we have a right to discuss together 
 as disciples and believers the content of religion itself. 
 
 Now the Christian doctrine of salvation starts with that striving 
 after God, but that inability to find Him and feel reconciled to him, 
 concerning which I spoke in my first lecture. If there is anybody 
 here who does not know what that desire for God and that discon- 
 tent with oneself without him is then such a man can get nothing 
 from this evening's discussion. The first condition of being able 
 to appropriate the peace and power of religion is greatly to desire it, 
 to know that it has something to olYer which we cannot do without. 
 It is Jesus' own teaching that nothing can be done for the man who 
 is already satisfied with himself. Not even our Lord, were He here 
 in person, could make religion either real or desirable to any of 
 you who feel that already you have everything that you want in 
 life, who are perfectly contented with your present moral and per- 
 sonal situation. Such a life, complacent and self-satisfied, has 
 already gone down into death, and there it will remain until some 
 one of the many shocks of fate, some great sorrow or disappointment 
 or sin awakens it to his own helplessness and its own desperate 
 situation. I pray there may not be many such men here tonight; 
 yet even in the days of our youth it is possible for men to be made 
 thus blind and dumb and deaf by their own spiritual dullness and 
 crass self-satisfaction. 
 
 I speak then to the men who feel the need of a God. but who 
 do not know how to find him ; men, who, whether or not they would 
 use the conventional phraseology, know themselves to be sinners. 
 
22 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 And first I should like to describe the various sorts of ways in 
 which this sense of sin comes to men that we may all understand 
 tonight just where we stand and who of us are included in the num- 
 ber of those who need salvation. 
 
 The first great group of sinners in college are those who have 
 been bound hand and foot by the sins of ignorance. If there be any- 
 thing which might well call forth the compassion of our Divine 
 Redeemer, it is these sins of ignorance with their uncomprehended 
 meaning and results. The restlessness of unexpressed and unintelli- 
 gible powers besets a youth. It flushes his cheek, it excites his 
 nerves, it fills his mind with strange, vague, fascinating dreams. 
 Sometimes these primitive instincts tempt him to deeds whose sig- 
 nificance he cannot know. Sometimes they fasten upon him abnor- 
 mal or indulgent habits of mind and Hfe when he is scarcely aware 
 of what a habit is. So it comes about that in the very morning 
 of life, when a man should be happiest and freest, he has the rest- 
 less hand, the averted look, the things which he must conceal, dark- 
 ness in his eyes! Are there many of us who do not know these 
 sins of ignorance in youth and the moral disintegration, the breaking 
 down of self-respect, the divided personality which follows from 
 them? Surely those of us who do know them want salvation, do 
 we not ? 
 
 Again, there are the men in college who are obsessed by the sins 
 of passion. These men have come to their physical and intellectual 
 majority. They know what they are about and are aware of the 
 significance of their deeds, but the imperious forces of an un- 
 bridled temper, or of an unexhausted or insatiable appetite, the 
 ever accumulating and mounting tides of hungry desires seem to 
 sweep them, in spite of themselves, off their feet. We cannot forget 
 the ancient tale, come down to us from the childhood of the race, 
 which conceives of sin as crouching at the door ever ready to spring 
 upon us unawares. The eager eye, the vigorous mind, the blood 
 singing in the veins almost perforce catch contagion from that 
 world of passion which lies in wait to prey on youth. Is it not 
 true, my brothers, that sometimes our lives are driven by the fierce 
 gales of temptation right upon the jagged rock of some great sin? 
 Sometimes a life that has seemed strong and fair goes down right 
 in our midst, does it not, and shocks us with its irremediable catas- 
 trophe? And such lives let us see what passions and what fights 
 with passion leap and rage beneath the decorous and mannered 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 23 
 
 surface of our lives. Because before these lives went under, for 
 many a week and month they must have been beset lives, battling in 
 their turn with the age-old sins. Before that final and pitiable ruin 
 they must have been drifting and struggling, driven and fighting, 
 sin drawing nearer and nearer, their fated lives apparently urged on, 
 the steering of their own lives wrested from their hands. And there 
 must have been the sense of coming danger, the dark presentiment of 
 how it all must end, the dreadful sense of life drifting toward a great 
 crash, of being upon the edge of the wreck of all things. I have no 
 doubt that there are young men in this house tonight, who, in this 
 day's very hours have been putting forth their desperate, sombre, 
 half -mechanical efforts to hold these mounting, leaping passions until 
 the darkness and helplessness shall lessen and something or some- 
 one shall give them peace. Surely you men need salvation? Von 
 would like to believe in it ! 
 
 And again there are men here who are given over to the sins of 
 deliberate intent. As I speak of this class of sinners we enter another 
 world. You are the men who have stopped fighting, who have sur- 
 rendered, who accept your sins, who may even acknowledge and 
 boast of them. Such a sinner was Gehazi, who stood before his 
 master and gazing into his face with unwinking stare lied, saying: 
 "Thy servant went no whither." Such a sinner was Hazael, who 
 although warned by the prophet of the sin he was about to commit, 
 went from Elisha's presence into the bed-chamber of the King and 
 taking a thick cloth and wetting it, laid it on his master's face and 
 choked him till he died. Such a sinner was that woman spoken of 
 in the Book of Proverbs, who, after her defilement, would wipe 
 her mouth and say — I have done no harm. And such was Cain 
 who slew his brother. Such brazen and deliberate sinners, this 
 and every other great university holds. Because in these previous 
 lectures I have spoken to you from the point of view of the natural 
 generosity and ethical idealism of youth, do you therefore suppose 
 that I am not aware of the men here who in cold blood encourage 
 others to initiate themselves in reprehensible practices, who ridi- 
 cule and embarrass their comrades who are trying to stand steadfast 
 in the right ? There are men here who deliberately tempt the weak, 
 who incite others to partnership in evil. Have you forgotten what 
 Jesus said? *Tt needs must be that oflfenses come, but woe to him 
 through whom the offense cometh." There are men who, so to 
 speak, hold their sins in their hands, steadfastly regard them and 
 
24 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 gloat over them, anticipate their enjoyment, look forward to the 
 night of gambling, dwell in delight upon the proposed debauch, are 
 eager for the coming week-end and its secret shame and shameful 
 secrecy in the great city yonder! Do you not think, you who are 
 this sort of men, in the moments of shame and agony and remose, 
 which still come to you at times, do you not think you would like 
 to know what salvation is? Would you not like to get it and be 
 men again and free? 
 
 And finally, for you see I am taking this list of sins in ascending 
 order, putting the worst last, there are the sins of the spirit, which 
 so many men who have conquered the sins of the flesh, permit to 
 enslave and dehumanize their lives. It rather frightens us to remem- 
 ber how much harder was Jesus Christ upon these sins of the spirit 
 that he ever was upon the other sins. He saved her self-respect 
 for the woman taken in adultery, he took back into his comradeship 
 the cowardly and disloyal but repentant Peter, but he said — woe unto 
 you scribes and pharisees, how shall ye expect to escape the damna- 
 tion of Hell ! Now the scribes and pharisees, do you hear, the 
 scribes and pharisees, are here tonight. They are the profoundly 
 selfish men, carelessly using their fathers and their mothers and the 
 money and the faith they give, abusing the university and the treas- 
 ures that it offers, indifferent to the rights of others, exploiting life 
 not consecrating it, loving themselves and careless of their world. 
 They are the men who are sunk in dreadful self-complacency, who 
 are puffed up in the pride of their own conceit, who will sacrifice a 
 conviction to an epigram, and an ideal to a bon mot. They are the 
 men who are intolerant, who are cruel, who are hard, who are 
 indifferent, who have no interest in democracy, who think nothing 
 of their brothers in mill and factory and office and mine and who 
 care little how other men live so long as they be comfortable, who 
 are centered on their own prospects and their own ease. The dille- 
 tante in art, the dogmatist in learning, the smug conformist in con- 
 duct, and the bigot in religion — these are all deadly sinners, far 
 removed from loving, patient, generous, unselfish and believing lives ; 
 these men are the deformities of our humanity. So dreadful is 
 their situation that I am not sure that you who belong in their class 
 can understand or see yourselves as I describe it, but if you can 
 understand and see, do not you too want to be saved ? 
 
 I speak then to all these types of sinners in whose number I most 
 humbly and penitently include myself. What is salvation for us? 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 25 
 
 It is the acceptance for the free forgiveness of God, proclaimed and 
 certified to us in the Hfe and death of Jesus, our Lord. It is the glad 
 message which, since Jesus lived and died, the world will never be 
 able to forget, that even such men as you and I can be rid of all this 
 sin, can be forgiven for it, can come back into power and freedom 
 and self-respect and ])cace, and that all we have got to do to get 
 this salvation is to believe in this God of Jesus, accept his redeeming 
 grace and love, ask for it, will to take it, live in it. Lads who sin 
 and suffer, there is a way to restore to your souls the self -respect 
 which you have ignorantly lost. Creatures of passion, there is a 
 way to redeem the soul, ravaged and consumed, by extreme and 
 unbridled desires. Presumptuous wrong-doers, there is a way to 
 shame and refine and elevate the life that is brutalized and hard 
 through deliberate wrong-doing. Brothers who sin against the spirit 
 and the soul of humanity, who make practical negation of your 
 brotherhood, its opportunities and responsibilities, there is a way to 
 soften and make human and decent again your lives. That way is 
 not found in bitter self-condemnation, nor in reliance upon an un- 
 aided and weakened human will ; nor in the hope that the gradual 
 education of life and the gradual lessening of the fires of youth 
 will eventually of themselves lead us into some sort of worn-out and 
 withered continence. No, the being saved from the sins of youth 
 and the sins of age; the being set free from the sins that are blun- 
 ders and the sins that are insults ; the coming back of the soul that 
 has been led far off from peace and become estranged from prayer, 
 to its own true self ; is found when we become again like little chil- 
 dren ; when we bring our confessions to the redeeming Christ ; when 
 we are men enough to abase ourselves at Christ's feet and pray for 
 his love and grace to help us to ask God for his sake to forgive us 
 our folly, our passion and our crime ; when we lay hold by faith 
 on the Saviour of the world and walk and live with Him. 
 
 And now let me describe what this salvation is. Here is the thing 
 that happens to a man when, by believing in the God of Jesus, 
 through the grace of the life and death of Jesus, he repents and 
 asks for forgiveness and receives pardon and peace as the result. 
 First it brings a man into a new relationship with God, his fellow- 
 men, his own self. The dreadful sense of loneliness and estrange- 
 ment is gone. We don't fear God any more, nor feel as though we 
 were living in a sullen and perverted world, but we come back home 
 to Him. That which the theologians call guilt, which is this awful 
 
26 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 sense of being at odds with the universe, of being in a desperate 
 and helpless situation, is removed. Once more the life of God is 
 permitted to flow in upon our lives, and we are able — O wonderful 
 and blessed fact — to relinquish our lives to His, and the constraint, 
 the fear, the restlessness are over. And it gives us a new relationship 
 with our fellow men. It is no longer our fears, our shames, our 
 pride, which stand between us and other men. We have no longer 
 that dreadful self-consciousness which the sinner feels, that covert 
 fear that people are estimating us and finding us out. Few things 
 are more paralyzing to initiative, more inhibitory to self-expression 
 that this guilty relationship with men. But all this disappears in 
 this new relationship, we become natural, free, unafraid in all our 
 human dealings. The world is once more a friendly universe, and it 
 gives us a new relationship with our own selves. That consuming 
 restlessness which grows and feeds upon itself and then does grow 
 some more, subsides. The inner distractions are removed. There is 
 once more a sense of unity, and hence of composure and authority in 
 the personal Hfe, and with the quelling of the moral anarchy, the 
 return to the unity of self, comes also to the return of respect for 
 self. This whole fact of a new relationship with God and man and 
 Ourselves is what theologians call reconciliation. This is what St. 
 Paul referred to when he said that God was in Christ, reconciling the 
 world unto himself. 
 
 Again salvation means a new character. This return to a normal 
 relationship with the universe brings with it a return to normal 
 desires and a new and overwhelming distaste for vicious habits and 
 indulgences. The great tide of repentance and love and gratitude, 
 which rises in the sinner's heart, washes clear the moral life. It 
 effaces the old channels in the brain and gives a powerful impetus 
 to the new and better ones that are about to form. Of course this 
 doesn't mean that the consequences of our wrong doing are taken 
 away, or that never again are we to be tempted to go back to the 
 old, vicious practices. We shall be tempted. We shall have to fight 
 and fall many many times and keep struggling onward toward the 
 light, but we know something now we never knew before. We 
 know now that we can win out because we are not merely fighting 
 in our own strength — and every man who fights unaided is aware 
 in the far background of his mind that such a fight is doomed to 
 failure because the forces against him are too many — but now we 
 have God with us since we have turned ourselves to him, and the 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 27 
 
 eventual result is to be victory. In sliort not only the guilt of sin 
 is taken away by this blessed fact of salvation, but the power of it 
 is broken ; the captive is free ! Still he must be a struggling and a 
 fighting man, but he fights with God as a freeman in a free universe. 
 Who can measure the accession of hope and joy and courage that 
 this brings into human life? I suppose the old, and to many of us 
 the very precious phrases of the New Testament, about the washing 
 away of a man's sin refer to this very fact of experience ; that men 
 who through Jesus have returned themselves to God, in the new and 
 pure outburst of the life which accompanies that return, feel as if 
 a flashing mountain torrent had swept down through the valley of 
 their humiliation, had carried everything unclean and foul before it, 
 and had left it purified and fair for another and a better life. 
 
 And, finally, salvation brings to man a new destiny, for this entire 
 regeneration of the personality is a moral and spiritual process, it is 
 inward and essential, not material and external. And this new ex- 
 perience is the touchstone, so to speak, which reveals to us the moral 
 and spiritual realities of the universe, and the fact that we are akin 
 to them. So it immeasurably broadens the horizons of life, reveals 
 the eternal scope and significance of the struggle of the soul, makes 
 us to know that we are not children of the dust but of the stars, not 
 the sons of night but of the eternal morning. So by this process 
 of salvation, men come to know themselves as sons of God, and 
 hence as brothers of the race. Their lives are free and pure, their 
 minds are strong and calm, their hearts are fixed upon the eternal, 
 there is nothing in the world that can harm them or make them 
 afraid. In His light we see light, and by the strength of the eternal 
 we come back to power and to peace. 
 
 So it is my high privilege to give, as for sixty-three generations of 
 the human race the ministers of the holy catholic church of Jesus 
 Christ have been giving, the great invitation. Any man in this room 
 who is ashamed, who is impure of mind, or sick of heart, who is 
 helpless or bewildered, or callous and selfish and hard ; any and all of 
 us who are struggling with the sorrow and loneliness, the sins and 
 fears and temptations of our amazing and pathetic humanity, let 
 us bring ourselves tonight to that Divine Redeemer, through whom 
 are assuaged the sorrows and forgiven the sins of our miserable, 
 splendid world. 
 
IV 
 
 RELIGION IN ACTION; WHAT WOULD THAT MEAN 
 FOR ME TODAY? 
 
 We have come to the last of our four talks together and I suppose 
 that I shall never again speak to all this company of men after to- 
 night. And the theme which now concerns us is the most concrete, the 
 most easily intelligible of all — the relation of our religion to our 
 daily life, how these great faiths, this wonderful moral and spiritual 
 experience expresses and verifies itself, is borne witness to, in 
 conduct. How much easier it is to speak upon a theme, so intimate 
 and personal as this, than it would have been four nights ago. You 
 will remember that I told you, that first evening, that religion is 
 the most inclusive and potent interest of our race. You and I have 
 been proving that statement together ever since. For, because of 
 the majesty and vitality of the theme we have been discussing we 
 all understand one another tonight. Nothing but religion could 
 have so truly and so quickly made us one in a common faith and 
 confidence and love. I talk tonight not merely to Princeton under- 
 graduates but to my brothers. I stand tonight among my friends; 
 I love them, they love me. 
 
 Now the first thing that I want to do is to make clear the supreme 
 importance of tonight's discussion. We are not going to close this 
 series of meetings with any attempt to register by statistics their 
 efifect. We shall ask you to sign no cards, or make, in this or any 
 other meeting, any specific promises ; nothing which would remotely 
 suggest the endeavor to corrall any of you into a mechanical or 
 external allegiance is to be attempted. Most of all no one of you, 
 under the stress of the emotion which a great public meeting like 
 this might naturally arouse, is to be asked for an immediate un- 
 reflective decision. We have tried to set religion before you not as 
 a discipline, but as the greatest opportunity that life offers. We 
 have tried to make you see its high and inherent reasonableness, its 
 natural and fundamental relationship to the whole man and to the 
 whole of our race ; we have tried to show the needs which it meets and 
 the gifts which it oflfers. And now it seems to us that having 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 29 
 
 honestly and faithfully given you the message we should leave you 
 to the spirit of God and let Him do his own work among you ; and 
 should direct you for further human counsel and inspiration to those 
 ministers and instructors here in your own community whose daily 
 lives you know, and whose unfeigned unselfish and steadfast interest 
 in you is assured. 
 
 But, just for this very reason, because there is to be no attempt 
 to register spiritual effects by mechanical means, it is the more 
 important to point out to you that you yourselves must see to it, by 
 such means as your own situation and your own conscience shall 
 point out, that the effect of this week's work shall not be permitted 
 to dissipate itself in passing emotions. It must not be true of you 
 that you are to be neither better nor worse than you were before 
 the meetings began. If that should happen then it were a thousand 
 times better the meetings had never been held. You who know even 
 the elements of psychology understand that for a man to submit 
 himself to any influence which enables him to think more clearly or to 
 feel more deeply and then for that man not to translate his new 
 vision and his new resolve into life and action is most degenerative. 
 Emotion which leads to nothing turns a man into a sentimentalist. 
 If what you dare to dream of you dare not to do, then you are 
 despicable both in your own eyes and in those of your fellowmen, 
 and your dreams are your dangers. We owe it to ourselves, to the 
 University,. and to religion that 
 
 The task in hours of insight willed 
 Shall be in days of gloom fulfilled. 
 
 It is then of the content of that task that we turn now to speak, 
 and I want to present it under four main heads. 
 
 First: the way in which the Princeton undergraduate will begin 
 to live out his religious life will be by attending more scrupulously 
 and more effectively to his academic duties. No man can get his 
 life right with God unless he puts first things first in it. One of 
 the subtle temptations which every beginning Christian faces is not 
 so much to do things that are wrong as it is to put otY the funda- 
 mental and more difficult duties and occupy ourselves with secondary, 
 easier and more attractive ones. Now a man who is truly religious 
 is honest, and he faces himself and his situation as they actually 
 are. What does this place stand for ? It stands for intellectual disci- 
 pline. Schools are for schooling; places of learning for learning. 
 
30 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 Some things at some times in a man's life are first, other things at 
 other times. The first thing now for you is to get your lessons. Do 
 you want to know what I want to see of a young disciple in Princeton 
 University and what I reverently believe Christ wants to see of him? 
 I want to see a young Christian scholar, a man of intellectual con- 
 science, sober in statement, accurate in thinking, scrupulous in per- 
 forming academic duties, a man who is disciplining his mind for 
 Christ's sake. This is the way in which Christian discipleship first 
 shows itself in a college. Discipleship cannot be summed up here 
 merely in clean and amiable living, nor in a devout and pietistic life ) 
 it does not begin with social service, nor with any of the other things 
 that you might think. Christianity in a college begins with intellectual 
 industry and a high regard for your primary, which is to say your 
 academic duties. We all remember the story related in the biography 
 of Phillips Brooks of what happened when he first went down 
 to Alexandria in Virginia to begin his theological training. He 
 arrived in the evening, after the courses of the day were over, and 
 found his fellow students engaged in a prayer meeting. He was 
 naturally a shy man, with no great facility of superficial religious 
 expression, and he was both embarrassed and discouraged as he saw 
 the ease and eloquence with which the students prayed and testified, 
 some of them witnessing as though their very souls were on fire. 
 Brooks felt himself humble and abashed in the presence of these 
 young apostles. But in the following days when he saw these men in 
 the class room, heard them fail in their various courses, realized 
 the intellectual laziness and failure in academic duties which they 
 displayed, he then felt for them a healthy and well merited contempt. 
 No man can do much for our Lord Jesus Christ, in this college who 
 is not able to convince his peers here that he works hard on his les- 
 sons for Jesus* sake. Indeed one of the most serious questions facing 
 us now in American colleges is the extraordinary feeling that has 
 f^rown up among undergraduates that not only is learning incidental 
 and that social activities, athletics, literary and dramatic endeavors 
 are more important, l)Ut that religion has no intimate and necessary 
 connection with the intellectual life. Over against this fundamental 
 heresy, we must place again and again the assertion that religion 
 is most naturally and justly presented to men in your situation 
 through their minds by the appeal not to their emotions but to their 
 intelligence, and that the first place in which a new religious life 
 will show itself will be in a higher, a more serious and patient 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 31 
 
 scholarship. If you bcHcve that the Infinilc Father looks down upon 
 all his children old and young, and, in his omniscience is able to ob- 
 serve and estimate us all, then you may be sure that what he wants 
 to see of you tonight as you go out from this meeting to re-begin 
 the routine life of the college, is a more willing, a more adequate 
 and loyal allegiance to your distinctively academic duties. 
 
 Second: Parallel with this expression of religion in college life 
 must be the living of it out in character. No religion is real unless 
 it issues in the progressive achievement of moral victory. No man 
 can keep his self-respect, his sense of personal sincerity, unless he 
 links up his religious emotion, all the dynamic of a great faith and 
 a great vision with every day conduct. It is by our fruits that men 
 shall know us, and the most indispensable of those fruits is a sober, 
 righteous and Godly life. We must never forget that no man may 
 be allowed to divorce religion from conduct. We must remember 
 that ''what a man is speaks so loud men cannot hear what he says." 
 It is in the homely, every day, often distasteful duties that one 
 exercises one's religion until it grows and deepens in power and 
 reality. You must demand of yourselves, as certainly the world will 
 demand of you, that a revival of religion in this University will show 
 itself in the wiping out of profanity, in the resolute setting of under- 
 graduate opinion against vulgar and dirty speech. It is a well 
 known fact that the grosser forms of immorality are decidedly 
 lessening in American colleges, but callous and brutal and irreverent 
 and licentious language is amazingly common. Now no man can call 
 himself a follower of Jesus who does not keep his mind and his 
 mouth clean. We dare not say we are religious if we permit ourselves 
 to take the name of God in vain. All that ancient and vile vocabu- 
 lary, which comes down to us, not through lexicons and dictionaries, 
 but is handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth 
 in all sorts of crooked and furtive ways in the purlieus of our towns 
 and cities among crooked and dirty people — all that we have got to 
 get rid of. The men who last night in this college sat up all night 
 long at their game of poker, the men who condone or practice 
 drunkenness, the men whose indiflference on grave, moral questions 
 helps to make undergraduate public opinion low and inefYective. all 
 these men have got to turn about in their tracks if the religion 
 which they have seen here today is to remain with us and to be a liv- 
 ing reality not a name. The mere pietist who can talk about religion 
 and feel religion, but does not incarnate it in a brave, unselfish, pure 
 
32 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 minded, honorable and dutiful life has neither respect of God nor 
 men nor even of his own soul. Salvation is not indeed by character, 
 but salvation is to character. The most certain way to increase your 
 religion, to know its truth and power, is to use it all in the daily 
 struggle for those moral attainments, that high and unselfish self- 
 control in which it naturally issues. Whatever else shall be said to 
 you tonight which you may or may not remember, I pray that you 
 may never forget this — God's man is a good man. 
 
 Third : No man can put religion into action today unless he clearly 
 realizes that it does not stop with personal character and cannot be 
 identified with it, but that characer is the means toward the expres- 
 sion of religion in the unselfish and sacrificial service of our fellow 
 human beings. The Christian must understand his world, must 
 realize the social and economic injustice which curses it, must have 
 a profound care for it, feel a solemn responsibility for the economic 
 unrest and misery of our time, and address himself to its allevia- 
 tion. One of the most depressing things about the American college 
 is the provincialism of the average student. Personalities, events and 
 facts which belong to your immediate locality chiefly interest you. 
 Your lives are so sheltered, they have so much of the gracious, the 
 lovely and the pleasant, enjoy such freedom and such leisure that 
 you almost lose the power to realize how needlessly hard and cruelly 
 unjust is the lot of most men and women who live just beyond these 
 sheltering academic walls. But it is for these human beings, your 
 brothers, who are born in poverty and ignorance, live in misery and 
 injustice, go out at the end, drink sodden and despairing, passing from 
 blackness here into blackness there — it is for them you have your 
 religion, and with courage and insight and sacrifice you must address 
 yourself to their release from bondage. If Jesus taught anything 
 at all he taught this — that no man is the son of God unless he is a 
 brother of the race ; that oneness with God is accomplished through 
 union with humanity ; that Christianity is not a doctrine, it is a life, 
 a serving, sharing, sacrificing life. If I love not my brother whom 
 1 have seen how can I love God whom I have not seen. Therefore 
 in every social struggle, the obligation is solemn and heavy upon the 
 Christian student to be profoundly interested. In the old days of 
 another civilization, of a social order based upon other principles, 
 Christianity chiefly expressed itself in individualistic terms. The 
 disciple was like Christian in Bunyan's Pilgrim's IVogress. The 
 moment Christian realized the City of Destruction was doomed, 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 33 
 
 he fled away from it; he forgot wife and cliild and friend and 
 neighbor and kinsfolk. Sohtary and self-absorbed he made his 
 way through the Slough of Despond and the straight and narrow 
 gate, past the Interpreter's House and the House Beautiful to the 
 Delectable Mountains. But today the Christian knows full well, if 
 he really believes in and follows Jesus, that it is not his personal 
 salvation that he seeks but the bringing of the Kingdom of God 
 on earth through that personal salvation. Our world is full of Cities 
 of Destruction ! You and I can neither ignore them nor despise them 
 nor desert them. It is our blessed duty to endeavor to redeem them. 
 We must live for them or die with them. 
 
 Therefore, as we regards our fellow men, we desire and we mean to 
 know their fears and hopes and ambitions, their passions and de- 
 spair. We see the present life about us, not as a great and moving 
 pageant, sometimes glittering and splendid, sometimes sombre and 
 terrific, but to be ever viewed with the cool and indifferent scrutiny 
 of the spectator or to be coolly and shrewdly used for the futherance 
 of our own ambitions — no, we see it as the consecrated, blood- 
 stained arena, upon whose torn and darkened sands, strewn with the 
 wreck and debris of the ages, are fought out the piteous life and 
 death struggles of separate human beings. And for them our 
 hearts beat, for them our minds work, for them our will is strong. 
 Into their fierce and tragic conflict we long to plunge our lives. 
 The Christian student, by virtue of his university training and his 
 spiritual equipment, declares to himself, — ''surely the only true 
 knowledge of my fellow men is that which enables me to feel with 
 them. My subtlest analysis will have no justification and it will 
 miss the essential truths unless it be lit up by that love which sees in 
 all forms of human thought and work the veritable and precious 
 struggles of beloved human beings." The laborer who joins the 
 Union and the scab who keeps out of it ; the man who drinks because 
 he is poor and the man who is poor because he drinks ; the man 
 who tramps because he can't get work, and the man who can't get 
 work because he tramps; the much married or the non-married 
 men and women who have never had a chance to see what true love 
 is and never had a chance to make a home in which to cultivate it, — 
 these are the very people for whom the disciples of the Nazarene are 
 put into this world ! Any notion of ourselves as the fastidious elect, 
 and of these as the impossibles and the degenerates, any indif- 
 ference, ignorance, blindness as to the way in which the other three- 
 
34 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 quarters live, is in us, criminal. The Father-God, and the suffering 
 world have a right to expect that the liberally-educated Christian 
 will feel the horror, the godlessness, the awfulness, of faring 
 sumptuously every day without real and vital concern for the 
 thousands of Lazaruses who lie in their sores, amid the dirt and 
 the dogs, outside our gates. I am dwelling purposely on this for 
 in every age of the world Christian discipleship has justified itself 
 as it has expressed itself in the terms of the greatest need and 
 addressed itself to the most poignant problems of its particular time 
 and place. That the need and the problem of our day is social and 
 industrial no sane man can doubt. We must not suppose for a 
 moment that our father's expression of religion would be an ade- 
 quate expression of it for us. He tried with it to meet his day 
 and generation ; we must try with it to meet ours. Hence both the 
 University and the Church have the right to expect of you that you 
 will make your coming profession or business not merely a means 
 to a living, but a means to the serving of the needy, to a correcting 
 of the injustices in your time and generation. Religion in action 
 today for the generous and the cultivated man means the confes- 
 sion that any man or any race or creed or color who does not 
 have a full and abundant life in any department of his being 
 becomes thereby the immediate object, not merely of our interest but 
 of our patient and unselfish service. H there is anything desirable 
 that I possess and value, according to the teaching of Jesus I cannot 
 rest until my brother shall have a chance to share its possession and 
 enjoy its excellence. My raison d'etre as a Christian is to serve my 
 race. The lynched negro of the South, and the men who lynch him 
 too, the wretched wanderer on my city streets, the child of the neg- 
 lected rich, the children in the cotton mills and the glass factories, 
 the women in the sweat shops, the operatives in the dust-laden, 
 fluff-filled air of the factories, and we ourselves — all are one. We 
 acknowledge no distinction, no difference in relationship, no grada- 
 tion in responsibility. When the day shall come that those who 
 confess and call themselves Christians shall compete for service, not 
 for mastery ; shall strive side by side to see who shall best measure 
 his life by loss instead of gain, not by the wine drunk but by the wine 
 poured forth ; then we shall know for the first time in this wretched, 
 struggling, stumbling world, the joy and freedom, the peace and 
 sweetness of a real brotherhood. 
 
 Fourth: Religion in action will finally and supremely express 
 itself in the increasing power to relinquish our lives, wholly and 
 
RELIGION AND THE UNDERGRADUATE 35 
 
 consciously, into the keeping of the eternal. By the obedient will 
 and the open mind and the loving heart ; by the daily reading of 
 the words of life; by the precious and difficult exercise of prayer; 
 by much meditation upon the life and person, the teaching and 
 sacrifice of Jesus, men have come to more and more live within 
 the spirit of the universe, and to find the passion for his glory taking 
 up into itself all lesser desires, there to cleanse and empower them. 
 When a man searches for the truth and loves it with a true and 
 holy passion because the truth is not something impersonal, just to 
 be sought for its own inherent worth, but because the truth is the 
 expression of the mind of God, having absolute and illimitable sig- 
 nificance, then he becomes a religious scholar and his faith has 
 added something to the insight, the depth, the quality and extent of 
 his scholarship that nothing else could give. When a man gives 
 himself over to the beauty of the world, greatly desiring that beauty 
 and trying to reproduce it in his own life because he believes and 
 knows that beauty is excellent, has its final worth and meaning, be- 
 cause it is the expression of the infinite grace, the unutterable love- 
 liness of deity, then religion, having sanctified beauty, has given it 
 both a power and an elevation nothing else could oflFer. When 
 a man loves goodness and delights in whatever is pure and brave 
 and patient and unselfish, because all this moral life he knows and 
 and feels to be derived from infinite holiness, then the moral life 
 has a sanction and a splendor which only religion can oflfer. When 
 a man loves his fellow men, because in every one of them beneath 
 the sin and the sorrow, the ignorance, wretchedness, injustice he 
 knows is concealed of the glory of the face of the Son of God, — 
 then his love for men, since it springs out of his vision of the eternal 
 Fatherhood, is a sufficient and a perfect brotherhood. As men 
 are thus able to trace all the fundamental passions and relations 
 of their lives back to the one source from which they issue ; as we 
 thus interpret and live all life in terms of the eternal, thus do we 
 come fully into the power and freedom of religion. It is only 
 the man who tries to walk with God who is fundamentally reli- 
 gious, and what he is in God makes potent and beneficent every 
 activity and relationship of his life. I have asked you tonight to dis- 
 cipline and use your minds for Jesus* sake ; to strive persistently, 
 through the power and grace of Jesus, to gain the light and peace 
 of moral victory; to open your arms to the men whom Jesus has 
 taught us are our brothers, to walk shoulder to shoulder with them, 
 sharing all you are and have on the hard and painful road of life. 
 
36 ALBERT PARKER FITCH 
 
 The final word is this. All these things must be done for God's 
 glory; all these things can only be fully done when we have the 
 consciousness and the power of God's presence ; when they are thus 
 done and all in human life is seen projected on the screen of an 
 infinite existence and progressing toward infinite and eternal ends, 
 then the glory and the majesty of religion are ours. 
 
 So religion in action sums itself up in the end in the cultivation 
 of the inner life, the personal, spiritual exercises which must be 
 the source and dynamic for all the far flung activity. And the final 
 word I have to say is of mystical and personal religion. Make for 
 yourself within your own life an inner sanctuary, into which no 
 other human eye may ever look, up to whose door no other human 
 step shall ever come. Cleanse and sanctify the outer life that this 
 inner refuge may be real and shining, and then every day, and 
 more than once in every day, withdraw yourself from the world and 
 all its life that presently you may enter more deeply and effectively 
 into it. Draw in the widespread abundant forces of your nature, 
 fix the mind, the heart, the will upon the thought, the presence, the 
 person and the power of God. Get yourself by yourself until you 
 are alone and for a time for you, the universe holds nothing but 
 the Eternal and your presence before Him. Go up to the door 
 of your own soul, to this inner shining sanctuary, enter and shut 
 out the world. There be still and know that He is God ; there eat 
 the meat which the world knoweth not of; there have peace with 
 Him. If you will do this, you will know that religion is the only 
 thing in life which never disappoints, which always satisfies, which 
 abides unaltered amid the changes of time and the delusions of 
 men. In that sanctuary God will keep you secretly as in a pavilion 
 from the strife of tongues. He will correct the perspective, He 
 will renew the vision, He will recharge the vital forces. From that 
 inner refuge, out of these hours of communion, these experiences of 
 the eternal, you will issue into all the noise and tumult of the 
 daily life about you, able to understand it, to interpret and guide 
 and emancipate it ; able to love and to believe in your fellow men, 
 able to bear with them in infinite patience, to estimate them with 
 divine charity, to show to them the way of life. There is not a 
 man in this University who, if he will only resolve to believe in and 
 follow Jesus, to trust the God of Jesus for forgiveness and grace 
 and strength, to live by His life and increasingly to appropriate it 
 day by day, may not go forth from the University into the unknown 
 perils and contacts of his future conquering and to conquer.