eauty of
the Gospel stories, will not the sublimity of the Old Testament
poetry, make their own appeal to these? They might do so if they were
allowed to exert their spiritual magnetism. But what chance have
they? The chilling shadow of the impending examination falls upon
them and cancels their educative influence. It is not because the
Gospel stories are full of beauty and spiritual meaning that the
child has to learn them, but because he will be questioned on them by
the Diocesan Inspector. It is not because certain passages from the
Old Testament are poetry of a high order that the child commits them
to memory, but because he may have to repeat them to the Diocesan
Inspector. We cannot serve God and Mammon,--the God of poetry and the
inward life, the Mammon of outward results. The thing is not to be
done, and the pretence of doing it is a mockery and a fraud. The
compulsory preparation of the plays of Shakespeare and other literary
masterpieces for a formal examination, too often gives the schoolboy,
or the college student, a permanent distaste for English literature.
The study of the Ancient Classics for the Oxford "Schools" or the
Cambridge "Tripos" too often gives the studious undergraduate a
permanent distaste for the literatures of Greece and Rome. Does it
not follow _a fortiori_ that to cram a young child, for the purposes
of a formal examination, to cram him, year after year, with the
idyllic stories of the New Testament and the poetic beauties of the
Old, will in all probability go a long way towards blighting in the
bud the child's latent capacity for responding to the appeal, not of
the Bible alone, but of spiritual poetry as such?

I do not wish to suggest that the religious instruction given in
our elementary schools is always formal and mechanical. There are
teachers who can break through the toils of any system, however
deadly, and give life to their teaching in defiance of conditions
which would paralyse the energies of lesser men. As I write, I recall
two teachers of elementary schools, who, in spite of having to
prepare their pupils for diocesan inspection, succeeded in quickening
their religious instincts into vital activity. The first was a
schoolmaster,--a "strong Churchman," and a sincerely religious man.
The second was a woman of genius, whose extraordinary sympathy with
and insight into the soul of the child, enabled her to give free play
to all his expansive instincts, and in and through the