this deadly preservative, is the progressive aggravation of all its
own inherent defects. The plight of an organism is indeed desperate
when the very poison which it ought, if healthy, to eliminate from
its system, has become indispensable to the prolongation of its life.

It is notorious that the application of the examination principle to
religion--the attempt to estimate spiritual health and growth in
terms of outward action--generates hypocrisy, or the pretence of
being more virtuous (and more religious) than one really is. When
applied to the education of the young, the same principle generates
hypocrisy of another kind,--the pretence of being cleverer than one
really is, of knowing more than one really knows. So long as the
hypocrite realises that he is a hypocrite, there is hope for him. But
when hypocrisy develops into self-deception, the severance between
outward and inward, between appearance and reality, is complete.
In a school which is ridden by the examination incubus, the whole
atmosphere is charged with deceit. The teacher's attempt to outwit
the examiner is deceitful; and the immorality of his action is
aggravated by the fact that he makes his pupils partners with him in
his fraud. The child who is being crammed for an examination, and who
is being practised at the various tricks and dodges that will, it
is hoped, enable him to throw dust in the examiner's eyes, may not
consciously realise that he and his teacher are trying to perpetrate
a fraud, but will probably have an instinctive feeling that he is
being led into crooked ways. If he has not that feeling, if the
crooked ways seem straight in his eyes, we may know that his sense
of reality is being poisoned by the vitiated atmosphere which he
has been compelled to breathe. Nor, if that is his case, will
he lack companionship in his delusion. In the atmosphere of the
examination system, deceit and hypocrisy are ever changing into
self-deception; and all who become acclimatised to the influence of
the system--pupils, teachers, examiners, parents, employers of
labour, ministers of religion, members of Parliament, and the
rest--fall victims, sooner or later, to the poison that infects
it, and are well content to cheat themselves with outward and
visible results, accepting "class-lists" and "orders of merit" as of
quasi-divine authority, mistaking official regulations for laws of
Nature, and the clumsy movements of over-elaborated yet ill-contrived
mach