I AM writing in regard to Jenna Russell’s article about the sale of Northfield Mount Hermon School’s beautiful Northfield campus (“Northfield school’s next chapter: Christian college,’’ Page A1, Jan. 4). Its sale, while regrettable, makes complete financial sense, and is congruent with the spirit of the school’s religious origins.
What else would Northfield Mount Hermon’s evangelist founder, Dwight Lyman Moody, have built? That some alumni contend that the sale to a conservative religious college is “seemingly at odds with the prep school’s traditions of diversity and intellectual rigor’’ is preposterous.
In fact, religion was always tightly interwoven with the school’s devotion to intellectual rigor. This included mandatory chapel attendance three times weekly, and a required course of study in religion (unique for a New England prep school).
To me, a graduate of the first co-educational class of 1972, this sudden secular trend is in fact only a recent decline begun after the merger in 1971 of Northfield Seminary for Young Ladies and Mount Hermon School for Boys - a decline that became clear to me recently when I learned of the use of Howard Zinn’s “People’s History of the United States.’’
The real spirit of Northfield Mount Hermon is best captured on the bronze plaque in Boston on the side of 25 Court Street (along State Street), which reads: “D.L. Moody, Christian evangelist, friend of man, founder of the Northfield schools, was converted to God in a shoe store on this site, April 21, 1855.’’
William Matthews, Boston 
