"Eight O'Clock Chapel"

A study of New England College life in the eighties by Cornelius Howard Patton and Walter Taylor Fields '83 with illustrations. Boston and New York.

Houghton Mifflin Company. 1927. Instead of playing bridge, Dr. Patton, with the vast enterprise of christian missions on his hands, associates Mr. Field with himself and employs his rare moments of leisure in writing this entertaining sketch of New England College life toward the close of the last century. The book is far more adequately described by its secondary title than by its primary one. The study of college religion occupies but thirty-seven pages out of three hundred and thirty-five and even these deal more with external, narratable, matters—amusing anecdotes of college preaching, the class prayer meeting, the customs of college chapel, the visits of the noted evangelists Drummond and Moody—than with the religious beliefs of the students. But the reason for the title may be found in the statement: "Chapel more than any other spot was the college. Once a day at least we became aware of ourselves as a whole." And throughout the entire volume, which is devoted largely to sketches of the teachers, to the pranks, to the dawning interest in athletics, one feels that the eight o'clock chapel—or at least what it stood for—was the centre and heart of the New England College of the eighties and the reason for its being.

But it is the biographical interest that bulks the largest. The authors have felt that what made the college was men and not customs, and so, though the strange follies and the familiar longings of the ancient day are duly chronicled, it is the teachers, who impressed their personalities upon the students of New England, who stand out most clearly from the pages of the book. There are brief sections devoted to the faculties of Brown, Wesleyan and Tufts but Harvard, Bowdoin, Williams and particularly Dartmouth, Amherst and Yale are the colleges whose outstanding teachers are sketched on more generous lines. Presidents Eliot, Hyde and Porter, Professors - Charles Eliot Norton, Charles Edward Garman "who never dimmed the truth by breathing on it;" who "chose to write on living men's hearts William Graham Summer, "who worshiped the forgotten man," are the dominating personalities of the book. The teachers at Dartmouth who are chosen for mention are Henry E. Parker, John King Lord, Arthur Sherburne Hardy, and Charles Francis Richardson. From the author's recollections of Dartmouth there emerge most strongly into print the bitter dissension in the faculty during President Bartlett's administration and the heavy pranks by which the students escaped from the quarrel. The value of the book lies chiefly in the fact that perhaps for the first time the New England college is treated as a peculiar entity, its customs and traditions lovingly gathered and the men who taught in its various branches grouped together as rare and neglected specimens of the human race. Because the personal is underscored the vanished atmosphere is recreated and one can actually meander under its quiet elms.

The inevitable assessment of the change in the ideals of the New England College of the eighties and of today is most judiciously made. Gains and losses are set down without bitterness and prejudice. That it has been invaded by other sections of our country and particularly by purposeless youngsters from the cities, enamored of the glitter of sport and indolence, that it has1 grown in decorum and courtesy, that it has advanced in scholarship, in the equipment of the teachers, in the physical development and intellectual culture of the students and probably also in morality, that "there is more tolerance and less outstanding vice or virtue," than there is a loss in individuality and self-expression, that on the other hand there is a keener sense of honor and an engaging loyalty and a finer equipment for the difficult adjustments of our modern life, are the optimistic conclusions of these fair minded students of the New England College. Out of the abundance of testimonies gathered from many quarters the authors adopt as their judgment the characteristic words of Professor Foster of Dartmouth, a member of the class of '85. As we all are. bowed today under the sense of loss that the news of his death has brought us, his judgment may fittingly bring this review to a conclusion.

"The period 1881-1885 was tumultuous, undisciplined, rather gray with lurid spots, rough, coarse but with underlying ideals of loyalty and religion to which appeal could be made and was made. There was a keen, deep, interest of some few men in literature and the intellectual life, a lack of variety in wholesome recreation, and social life with consequent action to occasional outbreaks. There was a larger proportion of individualism and a rather higher regard for the man of real brains and scholarship. The period was more democratic, but partly of necessity—almost all were poor.

"The undergraduates today are far more well-bred, polite, quiet, well-dressed and sophisticated. There is no trouble about discipline in the classroom. Boys are lovable and courteous —though too many are—uninformed as well as unformed. I have had some twenty sons of my own classmates under my friendly observation as undergraduates and I find them on the whole rather better than their dads, not quite so energetic but not so erratic. I would rather have a boy of mine under the present conditions than under those of forty years ago I think almost everyone in my day would agree with this judgment."