I think it safe to assume—and I shall assume—that every college student has a certain amount of religious conviction and belief—more than we sometimes think—-more perhaps than he is himself conscious of having. I am emboldened to say this because I believe that religion—that is, the relation of the human in us to the divine in us and above us—is a part of the essential nature of man, potential even though latent in every man, and because the Christian environment in which most college students have passed their early days must have called these potentialities into more or less distinct consciousness.

But what I recall in myself as a young man, and what I see in others, tells me that when this religious consciousness is made the object of appeal and of summons to expression and action it is very much inclined to withdraw within itself, and to fold itself about with reserve, and even to take on a kind of resistance. And when I examine this state of mind in myself and others, I think I can see that in a certain stage of spiritual immaturity, and perhaps more or less always, this reserve in religious expression is justifiable and even normal.