Word: chapelful
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Finally, in 1886, requirement of attendance at chapel were dropped. Since that time there has been no religious compulsion. Many of the manuscripts and reports of the period immediately prior to and following this action show the general attitude to the services and the reasons that they were retained so long...
President Eliot writes in his report of 1872-75 when the enlarging of Appleton Chapel, caused chapel services to be dropped for several months. "The Faculty . . . tried, quite involuntarily, and interesting experiment in college discipline. It has been a common opinion that morning prayers were not only right and helpful in themselves, but also necessary to college discipline, partly as a morning roll-call and partly as a means of enforcing continuous residence . . . the omission of morning prayers for nearly five months, at the time of year when the days are shortest and coldest, had no ill effects whatever...
After this experience it was evident that morning prayers were not necessary to keep order. But many still were anxious to influence as many undergraduates as possible to attend chapel services even if requirements were to be lifted. A plan was proposed whereby chapel would be an unprepared elective in order to increase its appeal. In opposing this idea one person sarcastically wrote, "Only those studious minded young men who go to college for work or are conscientiously opposed to set times for prayer would be likely to choose mathematics or German instead of prayers; and these probably have least...
...larger and more important issue was not daily chapel or religious regulation. It was Harvard's role as an essentially liberal community in an orthodox era that drew the most fire from critics...
From its earliest days, the College had been associated partly in fact and widely in public opinion with the liberal severance of connections with the First Unitarian Parish, still standing across from Harvard Hall: "As the altered Chapel was found to seat as many persons as the Church of the First Parish, the exercises of Class Day and Commencement were held last June in the Chapel, instead of in the church. Then disappeared the last trace of the official connection between the College and the first parish--a connection which had been maintained in various forms for more than...