suffering Israel. We should hear less about his low tone if he could give dinner parties or throw the social halo round his work that is thrown round the work of those to whom the title of ministers has been narrowed.

There may be other and overpowering reasons for declining to permit the elementary schoolmaster to give religious instruction, but I think it is high time for the sake of religion that we ceased to hear of his unfitness for the office.

Neither are we prepared to regard the stately literature of the Hebrews and the simple narratives of the Gospels as the sacred property of ministers of religion and the partisans of the sects.

The time is gone by when such men, however excellent, can be regarded as the sole possessors of the keys of these mysteries, and the lay mind of England as education progresses will effectually reject the new papistical tendencies of the Ultramontane Nonconformists.

It is not to be denied that those who seek in the name of Religious Freedom to banish Religious Instruction from the Public Elementary Schools can find grave reasons for doing so in the religious history of England in the past. But when we consider the immensely accelerated rapidity with which events have marched and thought has developed in our own generation we shall, I think, be led to believe that they are in the position of persons who, in considering the geography of a country, fix their eyes on a single county in its territory. Religious liberty, they assert with justice, has been infringed in the past by the establishment and support of a special form of religious belief. Therefore, in our public schools in the future we will have no reference to religion at all, so that absolute fairness may be insured. But slavery and freedom do not depend solely on external organisations. The power and authority of an established church in an age when the arts of reading or writing were

as

confined to the clergy, or in a more recent age of Squire Westerns and Tom Joneses, are likely to be of a totally different character from its power and authority in an age of Huxleys and Tyndalls and Endowed Schools' Commissions. Over the School Board children of this latter age neither the passmen from whom for the most part our curates are selected, nor the specialists often as narrow they are enthusiastic who are trained in the seclusion of our Nonconformist Colleges are likely to maintain the influence that their predecessors exercised over ruder minds more open to appeals to the feelings. The crowds that listened to the stirring eloquence of Whitfield could be moved to a change of life by histrionic and rhetorical appeals all the more effective because subtlety and learning and criticism found no place in them. But the crowds of that day were unlettered barbarians. Far different, unless the Education Act fails, will be the crowds of the future; and though the time will never come when the eloquence that comes from the heart ceases to influence, every forward movement in education diminishes its influence when unaccompanied by judgment and reason and knowledge. Mliss will be cynically indifferent to the impassioned appeals of a preacher whose intellect she sees no reason to reverence and of whose life she knows nothing; fresh from the laboratory Mliss will fail to see the immediate connection of every event in the Old Testament with the inward life or outward conduct of Mliss of the nineteenth century. But her knowledge of history will make Miss bitterly resent the notion that its most famous pages are to be closed to her in her school life, and that on one biography alone her teacher, who is her guide, her ideal, and the object of her worship during six days of the week,

I rejoice to think that now the unfair restrictions imposed on a University career have disappeared, young men training for the Nonconformist Ministry are in increasing numbers leaving this seclusion for residence at the Universities.

is to be silent, that on the seventh day a strange teacher may assert a monopoly of interest in the great Personage who is its subject, as though He were connected with her life only on one day of the week, and His history had no bearing on the other lives and events of which she reads in school.

The fact is, the torrent-like rapidity of thought, in the nineteenth century, has in its course swept priestcraft into an ocean where the air and the space are alike ampler than have ever been dreamt of in human history before. In this ocean the differences between Churchmen and Nonconformists are already lost. The narrow, though powerful, torrents of the sects are being merged in it. Drifting towards it the discerning eye may see the Liberation Society, and all disputes about the unknowable. To drop the figure, life has become too complicated, its interests too manifold, for men to be moved as they once were by religious contests. The problems with which they are connected are lost in the crowd of other problems which call for solution. Every succeeding day will make men less willing to leave the treatment of religion in the hands of those whose position as supporters of one set of views in opposition to other sets tempts them to dwell on those points on which men differ rather than on those on which they agree. The same causes will lead to a revolt against the arbitrary separation of the sacred and secular. In the web of human life you cannot separate the threads which you call sacred from the threads you call secular. They are closely woven together, and the work has taken its colours from the combination. Atropos is preparing in the future to twine them still more closely.

No one should shrink more earnestly from the attempt to pull them asunder than the ardent religionist. The separation of religion from conduct has stained the past history of religion with an indelible dye of crimson that is

its bitterest reproach, and to this hour repels some of the noblest spirits in the world from its noblest character, to whose teaching they erringly attribute these disastrous results.

In treating of the character of the religious teaching that should be given in a public school it will be regarded as pardonable to refer to the views of Dean Colet. One of his chief objects in founding his famous school of S. Paul's was to combine rational religion with sound learning. We may not agree with him in regarding the knowledge of Greek as useful exclusively for religious purposes. But weariness of theological controversies may well lead us to sympathise with his longing to find a rational and practical theology in the Gospels themselves, and to base his faith simply on a vivid realisation of the person of Christ, and to find a simple and rational Christianity in Christ's sayings, crying with him, "About the rest let divines dispute as they will." Is there anything in the whole history of education that throws a more real and beautiful halo of sentiment about our work than his pathetic saying to his scholars, "Lift up your little white hands for me, for me which prayeth for you to God"? Is there anything in history that more eloquently summons us, ceteris paribus, to cling to the teaching of Christ in our schools, than the figure of the child (not the man) Jesus which stood over the gate of his, the first, grammar school with the words graven beneath it, "Hear ye Him"?

In some respects our age resembles that of Dean Colet. He founded the first of those grammar schools, which in our time have been reformed and developed. He lived in an age of new learning when old beliefs were being shaken and men's minds were confused and even convulsed by new notions that many feared would destroy religious belief altogether. He sought a remedy not in the whirlwind of denunciation, or the earthquake of persecution, but in the

still small voice of accurate scholarship applied to the words of the founder of the Christian religion. In our own day, by new methods, and with different views, that vivid realisation of the person of Christ which he longed for has been sought after by scholars in nearly every country in Europe. In England, by the popular and epithetical Farrar, by the painstaking antiquarian Geikie, and the scholarly and sympathetic author of "Philochristus;" in Germany, in a scientific and inductive spirit that often rises to that eloquence of thought which surpasses that of phrase, by Keim; in Holland, in a more matter-of-fact and prosaic way, by Hooykaas; in Switzerland, in the sweet if not strong commentaries of Godet; in France, from an orthodox point of view by Pressensé, and with immense learning in the fascinating pages of Renan. The variety of views presented by these writers shows that the dream entertained by Colet of a vivid realisation of the person of Christ as the basis of religion has not been so easy as he imagined. But in spite of these discrepancies I think it may be maintained if not in a way to convince every one yet with more force than most assertions that are made outside the domain of rigid science that in the pages of all these writers, divided as they are, we have presented to us a life and character more fascinating and lovable, more capable of wooing men to love one another, and to work for the world's good, than any other we possess in history.

But it is probable that the intellectual difficulties of our age as far transcend those of the age of Colet as the social difficulties of his age transcended ours. Men are no longer in danger of being burnt or beheaded for expressing views different from those entertained by the Court or the Pope; even the social disabilities consequent upon holding unconventional views are, excepting in small country and cathedral towns, insignificant. But to the thoughtful and earnest minds of this age many questions are open which