Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/23



of the apparent incongruities of Harvard’s history is the fact that for over a century the College had no chapel. As a frontier town promptly erects its blockhouse, a logging camp its sawmill, or a new county seat its jail, so one might suppose an institution avowedly established as a divinity school would at once provide a special edifice dedicated to the purposes of religion. But it is characteristic of the founders of the University that they felt no such need. For them the beauty of holiness lay not in fretted vault or storied windows. Subconsciously, perhaps, they realized that the sterner, the barer, the colder, and the more cramped the quarters, the more appropriate for the creed they so pitilessly expounded. Their failure to supply anything better is the greatest outward and visible sign of the mental viewpoint that differentiated their College from those elder institutions which they copied with such pathetic fidelity in every other detail of equipment. Library, philosophical chamber (or laboratory), commons-hall, buttery, even the brew-house, they reproduced as faithfully as the poverty of their circumstances would allow;