RELIGION AND THE COLLEGE MAN
I have often been asked by people who only see the student in such playful and humorous moods, “Is the American college man really religious?” The answer must be decidedly in the affirmative. The college boy—with the manner of young men somewhat ashamed of their emotions—does not want to talk much about his religion, but this does not prove that he does not possess the feeling or the foundation of religion. In fact, at present there is a deep current of seriousness and religious feeling running through the college life of America. The honored and influential students in undergraduate circles are taking a stand for the things most worth while in academic life.
The undergraduate’s religious life is not usually of the traditional order; in fact it is more often unconventional, unceremonious, and expressed in terms and acts germane to student environment. College men do not, for example, crowd into the church prayer-meetings in the local college town. As some one has expressed it, “You cannot swing religion into college men, prayer-meeting-end-to.” When the student applies to people such words as “holy,” “saintly,” or “pious,” he is not intending to be complimentary. Furthermore, he does not frequent meetings “in derogation of strong drink.” His songs, also, are not usually devotional hymns, and his conversation would seldom suggest that he was a promoter of benevolent enterprises.
Yet the undergraduate is truly religious. Some of the things which seem at first sight quite out of the realm of the religious are indications of this tendency quite as much as compulsory attendance upon chapel exercises. Dr. Henry van Dyke has said that the college man’s songs and yells are his prayers. He is not the first one who has felt this in listening to Princeton seniors on the steps of Nassau Hall singing that thrilling hymn of loyalty, “Old Nassau.”
I have stood for an entire evening with crowds of students about a piano as they sang with a depth of feeling more readily felt than described. As a rule there was little conversing except a suggestion of a popular song, a plantation melody, or some stirring hymn. One feels at such times, however, that the thoughts of the men are not as idle as their actions imply. As one student expressed it in a college fraternity recently, “When we sing like that, I always keep up a lot of thinking.”
Moreover, if we consider the college community from a strictly conventional or religious point of view, the present-day undergraduates do not suffer either in comparison with college men of other days, or with other sections of modern life. The reports of the last year give sixty out of every one hundred undergraduates as members of churches. One in every seven men in the American colleges last season was in voluntary attendance upon the Bible classes in connection with the College Young Men’s Christian Association.
The religious tendencies of the American undergraduates are also reflected in their participation in the modern missionary crusades both at home and abroad. Twenty-five years ago the entire gifts of North American institutions for the support of missions in foreign lands was less than $10,000. Last year the students and alumni of Yale University alone gave $15,000 for the support of the Yale Mission in China, while $131,000 represented the gifts of North American colleges to the mission cause in other countries. The missionary interests of students on this continent are furthermore revealed in the fact that 11,838 men were studying modern missions in weekly student mission study classes during the college season of 1909-10. At Washington and Lee University there were more college men studying missions in 1910 than were doing so in the whole United States and Canada sixteen years ago.
During the last ten years 4338 college graduates have gone to foreign lands from North America to give their lives in unselfish service to people less fortunate than themselves. Six hundred of these sailed in 1910 to fill positions in foreign mission ports in the Levant, India, China, Japan, Korea, Africa, Australia, and South America.