In College

The pastor for students of the Episcopal Church at Cornell University has written a book on undergraduate (male and female) religion. Pessimistically he says: "The youth of our day in the universities has concluded that religion is being presented in a dead language, and is wondering what it is all about. There is a linguistic stalemate between the generations; the game is off; neither can move on the same board. So that today, when we speak to undergraduates in even the most familiar terms of the language of religion, we mean one thing (the fruit of our maturer reflection and experience) and they think we mean another. The opinion has developed among students that what the older generation means by its religion is neither intelligible nor useful.

"I believe that when we speak of God most undergraduates think we mean a stern and forbidding elderly schoolmaster, extreme to mark what is done amiss; or else a grim king on a throne, who is more concerned with sins than with the people who commit them; or else (to our shame, this!) a celestial treasurer, an expert accountant, with a keen eye on the subscription list and collection plate. And when we speak of Christ they suppose we mean a listless, effeminate, oriental ascetic, or else the tyrannical Son of an imperious Father, sent to enforce His laws on an invaded and conquered country. And they think that we mean by religion a daily dozen of don'ts. And they think we mean by salvation the collecting of a spiritual insurance policy, plus a snobbish disdain for the uninsured ninety-and-nine: in the words of the song, 'The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling for you but not for me.' And by the incarnation (if they do not register a blank) that God so loved the world that He--sent someone else. And by the Church that we mean only that particular branch or sect to which we happen to belong. And I think you will agree that their religious teachers have given them a picture of heaven and hell out of Milton and Dante and the Apocalypse, rather than from Christ Himself."