Article July 20, 1907 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from Arthur Chamberlain, R. J. Campbell

[The Boston Herald.]

Contrasting the $5,000,000 recent gift to Harvard's Medical School with the $200,000 additional endowment which the Harvard Divinity School needs and is not finding it easy to get, President Eliot at the recent Divinity School alumni dinner ventured to ask why the difference? He also asked why Christianity was exerting less influence in the country, and what is the matter with the churches.

His answer to the last question is that most of them are lingering among ideas which the thinking world has passed by, and they are not meeting the demand of the younger generation for square grappling with the great evils of society. "The youth of the present day," says President Eliot, "is not lookingn for salvation in the next world by rite or sacred symbol. He wished to be of service to the men who fall among robbers. He thinks the priest and the Levite pass by the great evils of society." For himself President Eliot believes the church needs "to take hold of evils that afflict society, go to the root of them and root them out." Thus doing, even though it cannot immediately, owing to its innate and structural conservatism, accept considerable reconstruction in its theology and philosophy, it can grip the best youth of its time; and thus better hold its own in a time of general institutional overturning.

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